Digital upgrades are music to audio houses' ears; sound studios bouncing back as technology hikes standards.

FROM the perspective of local sound studios, cutting-edge technology taketh away, and it now it giveth back.

Audio houses were staggered in recent years when technological advances allowed anyone with a computer and the fight software to mix their own sound or music. With market barriers down, new players flooded the scene and business dried up for the studios.

Now, the onset of digital television and sound and the widespread popularity of high-tech home theaters and entertainment systems have raised the standards for sound. Plasma TVs, video games and DVDs all now rely on more sophisticated sounds, far easier to produce for professionals with high-end facilities than one-man computer bands.

"We went through a tumultuous adolescence," said Jesse Meli, chief executive of The L.A. Studios Inc. "The (business) projections became harder, because it was not the same market you knew. Everything changed all at once."

Now, audio houses like L.A. Studios, POP Sound and Larson Studios Inc. boast big-name clients like DreamWorks Animation and Viaeom's CBS, Toyota, and News Corp's Fox Television Network, all of which have seen the advantages to having a wide spectrum of equipment with all the bells and whistles.

Higher standards

A government deadline for high-definition television upgrades looms (February 2009 is the target date) and the conversion requires more than basic tools. The prohibitive expense of hi-def equipment is weeding out some smaller operations, sending more work to the local studios.

The enhanced industry audio standard of 5.1 surround sound--using five speakers and a subwoofer, rather than two-speaker stereo sound--means that audio content for film and television must come from a number of sources and directions and has to be mixed accordingly, a far more complicated prospect than using one or two audio sources.

There is a human factor, too.

"Just because a person can buy the tools doesn't mean they can do that job," said Steve Thompson, POP's technical and creative director. "People have left and come back because they have found there's a difference in expertise--those with less sophisticated machinery can't do high-def stuff."

Sour notes

The audio houses learned some hard lessons along the way.

L.A. Studios, long known for expertise in commercials, built a $6 million Santa Monica facility, Margarita Mix, in 1999, expressly to pull in more work, and the strategy bore fruit for a short time. But after a crippling six-month Screen Actors Guild strike in 2000, followed by the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, things became dire for the independent houses, and more drastic steps had to be taken.

Meli called his L.A. Studios staff together at the Santa Monica facility to let them know the company had a choice--either undergo layoffs or have all company employees and executives share an across-the-board pay cut.

With L.A. Studios' revenue from its three houses between $8 million and $1w million, they couldn't afford to lose the business.

So they hustled and worked to reinvent themselves as jack-of-all-trades, going after films, music videos and TV shows that they previously might have ignored.

"As the industry shrank, we really had to reinvent ourselves and go after new things," Meli said. "It's like being a career pastry chef and suddenly you have to make entrees and hors d'oeuvres and do catering as well. It wasn't easy."

The houses' executives realized that their survival depended on the diversification of their business. But it wasn't always pretty.

"Our growth was not very organic," Meli said. "We broke our asses to get this work. If we hadn't, it wouldn't have come to us. The industry has not grown that fast."

Richard Ellis, vice president of Hollywood-based Larson Studios, said as a three-year-old company, Larson hadn't faced the same difficulties as other sound facilities. But it hasn't been all smooth.

In its first season of production, Larson landed its first clients: four half-hour network TV comedies. One was canceled a month into the season, however, and suddenly 25 percent of the studio's business was gone.

Larson, like others in the industry, began to rely far less on the network productions for their bread and butter.

"We learned we had to be flexible to the seasonality in the business, and aggressively pursue a wide variety of work," Ellis said " Cable networks, for example, work off-cycle, not necessarily September through May like other production."

Talent mailers

The linchpin of the houses' success has been the talent--accomplished career editors, engineers and mixers--that can work wonders with sound, and the difference in quality often brought customers back to the studios. And since it didn't kill them, it may have made them stronger.

"Our mission for the first two years was to reach everybody we could, to show us what we were capable of with our talent and creativity," Ellis said. "Now, we're coming up on pilot season and we'll be so busy all hell will break loose here."

L.A. Sound's Meli concurs.

"We all rode a wacky wave for a few years. The new stuff on the horizon spells wonderful things for our future."