Cairo Higher Institute of Cinema (المعهد العالي للسينما) was founded in 1957 as the first of its kind in the Middle East and Africa, and is affiliated to the Ministry of Culture& it is a member of the International Organization For Cinema Colleges and Institutes.

In November 2021, the Institute’s long awaiting new extension opening took place which includes Lecture Halls, Movie Theaters, Computer Labs, ADR/Folly Studio, and a Dolby Atmos Mixing Hall.

Audio Technology participated in this project as the main supplier and installer of all audio equipment, as well as the sound studios.

About 30 class-rooms are furnished with JBL Eon One pairs of self-powered speakers, another 10 class-rooms are furnished with pairs of JBL Eon615 self-powered speakers. All class-rooms are equipped with a Soundcraft EPM mixers and DBX effect processors.

Each of the small cinema theaters is furnished with three JBL 3732 three-way screen arrays, two 4645C subwoofers and eight JBL 9300 surround speakers. The cinema system is powered by Crown DSi dual-channel power amplifiers.

The small studio, the ADR/Folly studio is over a 100 square meters. It is designed around a Pro Tools small system of an HD native engine with an HD 888 audio interface, controlled by an S3 control surface as the core recording editing system. The monitoring system used for this studio is JBL’s 700 series self-powered studio reference monitors.

The real challenge was the Dolby Atmos Hall. The hall is a bit over 1,750 square meters in area. This is considered a huge mixing hall. The design work started in 2019 in close cooperation with Dolby in order to reach the international standard for mixing halls, and to be certified by Dolby and added to their catalogue as one of the worldwide approved mixing theaters.

The mixing system is based on a moderate size Pro Tools HDX system of three cards and a MTRX audio interface equipped with analog, digital, MADI and Dante cards. The system is controlled via S6 M40 32-9-D control surface with 32 faders, 9 knobs, 4 displays and a master joystick surround module.

The speaker system used for this hall consisted of 5 JBL 4732T three-way screen arrays with 6 JBL 5628 subwoofers, while the side surround speakers consisted of 16 JBL 9310 with 2 JBL AM 7215/26 at the front of the hall, and 4 JBL 4641 subwoofers. For the rear surround speakers 6 JBL 9310 speakers were used.

The top surround speakers used consisted of 16 JBL SCS12 with two JBL AWC159 at the front of the hall.

The whole system is powered by Crown 4 channel network power amplifiers, and linked to the Dolby server via a BSS BLU-806 audio processor & a couple of JBL 708P self-powered studio reference monitors are used for near-field monitoring.