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For years, SAE Institute Amsterdam has been a cornerstone of creative media education, providing students with the practical skills and industry-standard workflows needed to succeed in the professional audio world. Central to this mission is a long-standing partnership with Audient. From compact desktop interfaces to large-scale analogue consoles, Audient equipment is woven into the very fabric of the campus.
Recently, the facility took a major step forward by installing Audient’s dedicated immersive audio interface and monitor controller, ORIA, into their brand-new Dolby Atmos teaching space. We sat down with Giacomo Piscitelli, Head of the Audio Department at SAE Institute Amsterdam, to discuss how the Audient ecosystem supports their students and why ORIA was the perfect fit for their immersive room.
The Immersive Evolution
As spatial audio transitions from a luxury format to an industry standard, educational institutions must adapt quickly. For SAE Amsterdam, integrating Dolby Atmos into the curriculum was an essential move.
“Across our SAE region, including Germany, Switzerland and Austria, there was a clear decision that immersive audio had to become part of the student experience,” Giacomo explains. “So we had to move quickly and make sure the setup was implemented properly.”
When it came to choosing the central engine for this new multi-speaker environment, ORIA arrived at exactly the right moment. It offered a fast, intuitive and highly reliable way to build the room around strict Dolby Atmos standards.
“The built-in tuning and calibration features were especially important,” notes Giacomo. “They allowed us to work with the right external partners while still using ORIA as the central system to align the room to the Dolby curve and Dolby requirements.”
For the faculty, offering premium audio education means ensuring students are ready for real-world scenarios. Dolby Atmos has become a staple in post-production, cinema, film and other high-end audio environments. Giacomo adds: “We want our students to graduate with experience on the systems and workflows they will actually encounter in the industry.”
The Audient Ecosystem Advantage
One of the key strengths of SAE Amsterdam’s setup is the consistency across their various spaces. Students do not just encounter Audient in the immersive room; they rely on it throughout their entire educational journey.
The campus features a wide array of Audient gear. Students begin with the portable iD4 and iD44 desktop interfaces, which offer flexibility for various production situations. From there, they progress to using the rackmount iD48 to connect live rooms to production studios, utilising ASP880 preamps in Studio 1 and eventually mixing on the ASP8024 console in Studio 3, which provides their first experience with an inline desk.
This shared design philosophy, often referred to as the “Audient DNA”, provides a significant pedagogical advantage. “The advantage of this is consistency,” Giacomo says. “Students can start on a smaller interface and then move into larger studio environments without feeling like they are learning a completely different system every time. The signal flow, the sound quality and the general design philosophy remain familiar.” This familiarity helps students build confidence step by step as they tackle increasingly complex setups.
Beyond the educational continuity, the physical durability of the equipment is crucial in a busy university environment. Equipment is used constantly and not always gently, meaning it has to withstand what Giacomo describes as “the test of learning”.
“Students are learning, experimenting and making mistakes, so the gear has to be solid,” Giacomo notes. “Audient has always been a reliable manufacturer for us, with quality that meets professional standards. The equipment can withstand ‘the test of learning’, which is essential in an academic environment.”
Streamlining the Classroom Workflow
In an educational setting, advanced technology should not mean an overly complicated workflow. A multi-speaker array can easily become intimidating for students and cumbersome for teachers, but ORIA has completely streamlined the process in SAE’s Studio 1.
“ORIA has simplified Studio 1 quite significantly,” says Giacomo. “We now have a much more plug-and-play system. Students can come in, connect their laptop, use the ORIA app and access the speaker system through their internal renderer.”
This setup eliminates the need for complex routing and patch bay configurations just to get a session running, which was a challenge in their previous setup. For both faculty and students, the speed of the workflow has transformed the classroom dynamic. Students can plug in via a single USB cable and immediately hear their work across the entire monitoring array, while teachers can seamlessly review and check student projects.
Giacomo notes that the physical interface itself is remarkably approachable: “The physical operation is also very straightforward. There is a clear volume control and simple source selection, so students do not feel intimidated by the system. In my opinion, ORIA has made the entire workflow much more accessible, while still giving us the technical accuracy we need for an advanced multi-speaker Atmos room.”
Creativity Unleashed
The student response to the dedicated Atmos rig has been overwhelmingly positive. Having a physical, calibrated space to mix in has unlocked new creative avenues that simply cannot be replicated on headphones.
“They love the fact that they can work in a real Atmos room rather than only simulating an immersive environment on headphones or through binaural monitoring,” Giacomo observes. “The first time students hear their work in the room, there is always a strong reaction. They are impressed by the scale of it, and it immediately opens up creative ideas.”
Since the room opened, students have begun scaling up their major projects and thesis work into spatial formats. Instead of treating immersive audio as an afterthought, they are learning to arrange and produce with the physical space in mind from the very beginning. While music production and film post-production are currently the most common applications on campus, the team is already looking toward the next frontier.
Indeed in September of this year, SAE Amsterdam will be the first SAE globally to run a new Immersive Mixing Certificate using Dolby Atmos – certified by Dolby – of course using the Audient ORIA.
The Next Frontier: Immersive Game Audio
With the Dolby Atmos room fully operational and the Audient ecosystem running smoothly, SAE Amsterdam is looking ahead to push new creative and technical boundaries.
The next major focus for the audio department is game audio, specifically interactive 3D environments. “We already have the Atmos room in place, and now the goal is to expand how students can use that environment beyond music and film,” Giacomo says.
The facility plans to configure the system so that middleware tools like Wwise can communicate seamlessly with the ORIA-powered speaker setup, allowing students to design and mix audio for complex, interactive game engines.
“For me, that is the next sonic boundary: giving students the ability to design, mix and experience sound in three-dimensional interactive environments,” concludes Giacomo. “Film and music are already strong areas for us, but game audio offers another level of creative possibility, and it is an important direction for the future of audio education.”
With Audient at the core of their studios, SAE Amsterdam is uniquely equipped to guide students through these evolving sonic landscapes, ensuring they enter the industry as confident, capable and highly skilled professionals.
To learn more about SAE Institute Amsterdam and their creative media programmes, you can visit their official website at SAE Institute Amsterdam.