Audient in Full Sail University

The benefits of choosing Audient to teach the current generation of audio production students have recently been discovered by Full Sail University (www.fullsail.edu) in the US, with the installation of thirteen ASP8024 desks in their Recording Arts department.

Twelve 24-channel Audient consoles have been installed in what is known as the Analog Mix Lab and the thirteenth is set up in the lecture room. Greg Griffith, Sound Foundations Course Director at Full Sail University, explains: “Each station, including the one in the lecture room has a full patchbay, is loaded with time-based and dynamics processors and a hard disk based multi-track, enabling class demonstrations to be shown on the same equipment that the students will use in the lab.”

Eric Abraham, Console Department Chair at Full Sail University, says, "The ASP8024 consoles are being used in the Sound Foundations course, which is the first course in which the students get to deal with a true inline recording console. The students learn signal flow and the recording chain on these consoles; their straight-forward design makes understanding how the audio gets from one point to another in the process easy and quick to learn. The transparent sound quality of the console makes teaching other aspects such as compression, effects processing and mixing a lot easier as well, because the students can really hear the differences without the console getting in the way.”

Full Sail joins a growing list of education facilities across the globe that are choosing Audient ASP8024 to teach audio recording students. The reasons are manifold as Abraham explains: "The great sound, straight forward design, ease of use and even the layout of the desk make it a great choice for us in the Sound Foundations class.” He also praises the look of the console. “The color scheme even helps us in the teaching of the desk, as the channel path is one color and the monitor path is another.”

Griffith remembers the first time they came across Audient. "Wandering the convention floor at AES in NY 2003, I stumbled onto the Audient booth. We were looking for an analog console with a more conventional signal flow than the consoles we had installed -¬ a signal flow more similar to the SSL and AMEK consoles we have. Further, we needed desks that were more durable. The final choice was easy: the ASP8024 had all the features, durability, and price we required."

The fact that Audient’s consoles are well-known and respected within the professional audio industry as well as within the academic world is not insignificant to Full Sail. Founded in 1979, the school’s original focus was on audio recording education, and it prides itself that more than 74% of graduates over the last 5 years have successfully found a job or internship in their chosen field.

Thirty years on, Full Sail now offers Masters’, Bachelors’, and Associate degrees in a diverse array of contemporary fields, including Computer Animation, Game Design and Education Media Design and Technology, and has more than 31,000 alumni. The success of the college is demonstrated by 106 graduates in 2009 having worked on 78 award nominated projects.

Full Sail's programs are unique in that none are semester-based like other Universities. Scott Dansby, the University’s Industry Relations explains: “We have classes that start and graduate every month. Five to six days a week, students will attend a lecture for 4 hours followed sometime during that day by a lab ranging from 4-8 hours. Students can be here over 40 clock hours in one week. The labs are scheduled all day long and the school is running 24/7. It is quite common for students to attend a lab at 9pm, 1am or 5am in the morning depending on their schedule. Because of this schedule, our students typically graduate with an associate degree in about 11-13 months and a Bachelor's degree in about 21-23 months.”

Further information about Full Sail University can be found by visiting www.fullsail.edu.

This sale was organised by pro audio outlet, Alto Elite (www.altomusic.com) based in Middletown, NY and facilitated by Audient’s US distributor, CW Sales & Marketing (www.cwsalesandmarketing.com).