ATLANTA — Few companies in this industry have successfully weathered market swings, constant technological updates and changing client demands to celebrate 30 years in business. Atlanta’s Doppler Studios has not only survived but thrived for three decades, offering recording; editing and mixing for radio and TV; commercial music recording and mixing; sound design; CD assembly and duplication; and multimedia file conversion and ISDN links. “The only way to grow to this size in a market like Atlanta is to serve all kinds of customers,” notes Doppler President/Studio Manager Bill Quinn, who is partnered with Chief Engineer/VP Joe Neil in the enterprise. “That way a dry spell in one industry may coincide with the busy period of another. We’ve seen steady growth since we started, which has been true of the Atlanta market as a whole.” Quinn and Neil were friends and college roommates at Georgia Tech in the ‘60s when audio maven Neil was building a recording console in his bedroom. Quinn graduated and left the state. Neil, who had landed a job at Doppler and also operated his own remote recording company, Sam’s Tape Truck, suggested that Quinn return to Atlanta and join him at the studio which, at the time, was primarily a jingle house. Quinn headed back to Georgia and began his tenure with Doppler in 1973 as a gofer and junior recording engineer.

“Doppler had one studio then,” he reports. “There were no schools to go to for recording or audio engineering, so I was totally self-taught. I read every bit of literature I could on sound, acoustics, electronics and music.” He worked 15 years as a recording engineer at Doppler, moving over to the position of studio manager in 1988. Neil built a second room at Doppler to meet client demand for recording and voiceover services. He left Doppler in the late ‘70s but returned in 1983. During Neil’s absence, Doppler moved to its present location, its own stand-alone building. By 1985 the firm had doubled in size to 20,000 square feet, sporting five studios, including “a major league music studio with acoustics by George Augspurger,” Quinn recalls. “Every two or three years the company added another studio,” he says. In 1996, Quinn and Neil purchased Doppler from its founders. In 1998 they also acquired the building from the original owner. Last year Doppler marked its 30th anniversary.

Today the company boasts seven studios, four of them designed for audio post. Studios A and E cater to voice and sound effects to picture, sweetening, editing, mixing, ADR, music recording and Foley. While its control room is acoustically identical to Studio A, Studio E is “a much bigger recording space for choirs and small orchestras,” Quinn points out. Studio E’s live space is approximately 30-by-40 feet with three iso booths for drums, piano and vocal.

“We added booths so we can do a session with many instruments playing simultaneously,” Quinn says. “When In the Heat of the Night was shooting in Georgia we recorded the scores using 30 to 35 players simultaneously. Studio E allows you to mix loud and soft playing at the same time. “We can iso the instruments we need to, yet the studio is laid out so it wraps around the control room and everyone can see each other.” Studio E is equipped with a 56-input SSL 4000E automated mixing console, a large selection of audio processing gear and a Yamaha C7 grand piano. Both Studios A and E have a wide variety of Neumann, AKG, Sennheiser, Studer, Audio-Technica, ElectroVoice, and Shure mics for music recording, as well as a host of outboard gear. Studio G is a medium-size room. Its 12-by-15 foot studio is designed for voice recording and easily accommodates three actors. It is capable of 5.1 surround.

Studio F is fully digital and the second room at Doppler to be 5.1 surround capable. Studios B, C and D are used for voice recording, editing and mixing, though not to picture. The three rooms are designed for digital audio production for radio and other soundtracks.

Doppler has a centralized machine room for lay backs to videotape, including syncing dailies for commercials and independent feature films; timecode DAT; resolving and transferring various formats; and transfers to 16mm and 35mm mag. Three audio duplication rooms handle cassette, DAT and CD-R dubs, as well as a number of other services. Doppler offers 2,500 music CDs, an mSoft ServerSound hard disk audio retrieval system for instant access from any control room or audio suite to more than 60,000 sound effects. Voice hook ups are facilitated by ISDN lines with APT-X, CDQ Prima and CDQ2000 codecs.

Quinn emphasizes that one of the keys to Doppler’s continuing success has been the quality of the engineers who staff the seven studios. The engineers not only “understand the technology, learn the new technology when it comes along and are motivated by their career paths,” says Quinn, but also are aware that “they represent our company to our customers.”

Scheduling manager Beverly Kennerly notes that since “most agencies in town have been coming here for years and years” she already knows client preferences for engineering talent and equipment. “Almost all of our new business is word of mouth. When we get a new client, Bill and I begin to gather information” on how they like to work. “We try to pay attention to customer service not just in name but in practice,” adds Quinn. “People come here not just because their products sound good but because they don’t have to worry about the details.”



©Reprinted from POST, January 2000 AN ADVANSTAR PUBLICATION Printed in U.S.A.