BAPS puts faith in SSL Oracle
BAPS puts faith in SSL Oracle
BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha has installed a Solid State Logic (SSL) Oracle 24-channel in-line mixing console at its North American headquarters in Robbinsville, New Jersey, to support voice and music production for its congregations, events and media projects.
The studio, located on the organisation’s 185-acre campus alongside BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham, produces and post-produces content for weekly youth and adult congregations, summer seminars and 125 BAPS mandirs across North America. It is also being used to record and mix programming for a museum currently under construction on the campus.
Technology overseer Aksharmurtidas Swami said the studio handles a combination of musical material and voiceover recordings. The Oracle replaces a console installed when the facility opened in 2023, which offered only partial recall and made it difficult to move efficiently between projects.
“You need to make recall as efficient and accurate as possible, because I'm not going to sit there and recall everything every time someone wants to make a little change,” he said. “Unless it's instantly recallable, we're just going to use the bare minimum of its functionality.”
The Oracle combines a fully analogue signal path with digital control and complete recall of its functions. These include 16 bus routing switches, an integrated THE BUS+ compressor, four-band E/G Series parametric EQ and 10 aux sends. Its snapshot functionality allows the studio team to save and restore different versions of a mix.
“I love the fact that you can have snapshots and multiple versions of a mix, and you can load a file, and it just picks up right where you left off,” added Swami. “I really like the BUS+ compressor on this console, so I mix into THE BUS+ now, and that opens up a lot of different things that I normally wouldn't do if I didn't have this recall capability. It’s cool that I can make a lot of changes really fast and not have to worry about if I may need to back track on decisions, because I know it's recallable. It doesn't necessarily make you faster, but because you can always go back to a certain point without having to do anything, you're willing to try more things.”
The installation is the third SSL console within the organisation, joining an AWS console in Mumbai and a Matrix 2 in Sarangpur, India. The shared analogue workflow and sound character also support projects involving recordings made across the organisation’s facilities.
“From time to time, we do work on projects together,” Swami concluded. “We'll record some instruments in India, because we might not have an artist here that could play a sitar or veena or sarod. We would have to get some of that recorded in India and then we would do some of the vocals here. So, when we have to mix and match, it just makes it a lot easier that we're all using analogue SSL consoles and we know the sound signature is going to be pretty much the same.”
