Surround Factory, a French business founded in 2010 by sound to picture experts working on films, sound editings, sound designs, and re-recording mixings, was created to promote multichannel sound recordings to be used by professionals in the worlds of cinema, HD TV, video games, event creating, institutional, and educational films, amongst others.

Because sound is above all a human adventure, our project aims to bring together an international community of sound engineers working with multi channel recording. Their experience and their competence are there to welcome you to different worlds of sound, with a variety of different surround recording techniques, the state of the art in sound industry.

Our Surround Library offers ambiences and sound effects in different forms: in discreet 5.1 of course, but also in ambisonic (B-format), in Double-M/S, in Double-A/B, in Double-ORTF, and so on. It goes without saying that the sounds are recorded by experienced professionals with the best available hardware (Soundfield, Schoeps, Neumann concerning microphones, and Nagra, Sonosax, Aaton, Deva or Sound Devices for the recorders and amps). The resulting sounds are then checked in our studio, edited and metadated (BWF and Soundminer) in order to guarantee their quality.

For ease of use and to permit their application in traditional productions (stereo only), the sounds are also available in a carefully reduced stereo versions set up by us. For free…

And because sound is also a question of passion and curiosity, you will find for each sound all the technical information related to it such as its Author, the recording hardware used, its format (sample frequency and bitrate), and much more. All this information is obviously present in the downloaded audio file (BWF and Soundminer metadatas).

As founders of Surround Library, we were obviously attracted to ambisonic technology because of its on-location advantages (quite small mic. array), its flexibility (4 channels only), and its power of exploitation in post production (use of specific plug-ins, perfect compatibility with different broadcast formats, from mono through 5.1 and 7.1, to 12.0, which makes it a particularly long-lasting format).

You will find here professional quality sound effects and ambiences, both on a technical and aesthetic level, articles and advices about the different systems used for our library (from the recording to its use in post production), a modern exchange platform (forum), and regular news on our activities on our Blog and on the Facebook and Twitter networks.

Surround Factory, through its network, experience and professionalism, is a first choice partner for all your audiovisual projects. We can help at the beginning of the project, as second unit during filming, or during postproduction for retakes or making particular surround sounds for the project. We can also take charge of entire post-production films using the elements often badly known by the rest of the audiovisual crew.

The whole Surround Library staff is at your disposal to answer your wishes to our best ability. You can contact us for more information at contact@surround-library.com.

Dorian Darcourt and Alexandre Rocca, founders of Surround Library.