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Flagship Studio at Manchester´s SSR Completes First Academic Year With PMCs Central Manchester´s School Of Sound Recording has come a long way since opening in the early 1980s as Spirit Studios, although its beginnings augured well — the first band through the doors when it opened were an obscure 60s-influenced combo called The Smiths. Since moving into audio education in the mid-80s, the School has gone from strength to strength. Now, from two buildings connected back to back near the heart of the city, it provides highly successful courses in sound, music and radio production. For the 25th anniversary year of the school in 2009, SSR opened a new recording studio on the top floor of one of its buildings, a refurbished mill. Named the Spirit Studio in honour of SSR´s beginnings, the creative team at SSR wanted it to be something special from the start, as Tom Aston, the school´s Technical Director, explains. "The Spirit Studio was conceived from the beginning as our flagship studio, the place where all of our final-year recording students would be working, as well as being available for commercial use. The large, open room at the top of the old mill really is a beautiful space, with its concave roof, and quite unusual for a studio. We wanted to preserve it as much as possible. "The concept was not to have a separate control room and live room, but to have one large space incorporating both of these facilities. We wanted to remove the typical barriers between artists, producers and engineers to aid our students in capturing the best performances from the artists. It’s a concept that we see is becoming more popular and it is this concept that is attracting a lot of interest commercially. We also have separate isolation booths and, vitally, a machine room to ensure the main space operates silently. We immediately realised the choice of speakers and treatment for the room would be very important." A team of tutors and staff at SSR auditioned various speakers from their extensive selection throughout the school, and agreed that their finest-sounding nearfield monitors were a pair of PMC´s TB2S-A Mk IIs. They contacted PMC to ask their advice, and to see whether they could help with the design. After auditioning a pair of MB2S-A active mid-fields with PMC´s Ian Downs in one of their existing studios, they decided to proceed. "PMC were brilliant — we asked if they could recommend anybody to help us treat the room to make the best of the speakers, and they said there was only one person they usually recommend — Jochen Veith." A former musician and sound engineer based just outside Munich, Veith is now one of Germany´s most respected acoustic design consultants. His skills have gone into the construction of many mastering, recording and broadcast control rooms all over Europe, frequently in conjunction with PMC installations. Unlike many generalised acoustic architects and consultants, Veith, with his musical and audio engineering background, has an instinctive understanding of the requirements of a control room or studio, which may go some way towards explaining the demand for his services, although he remains modest about this. "This was a very unconventional studio: basically a control room and recording area in one, with the concave ceiling," explains Veith from his consultancy, JV Acoustics. "Because the room was going to be used to record and mix, it was fundamental to get the transfer function between the loudspeaker position and the listening position right. It was tempting to place the loudspeakers exactly in the middle of the room, when considered from front to back, but the shape of the roof would have given us a big problem. But by simulating the modal field and doing some acoustic measurements in parallel on site, we could find the best loudspeaker position and stereo image width, as well as the optimum distance for the listening position from the rear wall. And I had to put in quite a lot of acoustic treatment to control the reverb time and the modal field, because the room was so large. Again, it´s a compromise — a bit of reverberation is nice for a performance and recording space, but you don´t want too much because you´re going to be mixing there, and that can confuse things." The differing needs of performance/recording and mixing were tackled by treating different parts of the new studio in different ways. Tom Aston again: "Jochen´s job was to find the balance between making a good mixing environment and preserving a live-sounding room for performance and recording, and he achieved that perfectly. In the finished room, there´s a live-sounding area with more reflective surfaces, and the area near the console is much more absorbent, which is critical for mixing. Students can really experiment with the placement of instruments within the room to achieve a variety of sounds." Jochen Veith explains in more detail: "We hung a large acoustic absorber over the mixing console to counteract the concave roof shape, to absorb any reflections that could confuse the sound when you´re mixing, and we put more low-frequency absorbers — resonators — on the back wall behind the engineer. We treated the recording part of the room in the opposite way; we hung a convex reflective diffuser in the curve of the roof so that there was more of a live feel to that part of the room. Acoustically speaking, the room is quite varied." The finished Spirit Studio has been a great success with SSR´s commercial and student users alike — most recently with the BBC and The Doves — and Tom Aston has been particularly pleased with the performance of the speakers. "I believe we´re still the only educational facility in the UK with MB2S-As, and they´re brilliant; the clarity of the stereo imaging in particular blew other monitors we have out of the water when we were A/B testing. The speakers also seem very versatile: they can handle going from classical music, which we record a lot of here for the Royal Northern College of Music, to pop, rock and club music. This versatility is vital, as our 400 students work with many different styles and genres."
Bruno Senna, nephew of the late Ayrton Senna and himself a Formula One driver, is auditioning a pair of PMC´s AML2 active monitors for use in his Monaco-based project studio. Senna visited the PMC factory, met Chief Designer Pete Thomas and auditioned the AML2s between Silverstone training sessions in July. There´s another side to Bruno Senna, the Brazilian nephew of the late Ayrton Senna and himself a driver for the Hispania Racing Formula One team.
A long-standing fan of house and trance music, Senna has had a project studio at his Monaco home for several years where he carries out remixes and production work. Pride of place in this compact setup is a pair of PMC TB2S-A Mark II monitors, but their owner has been looking for something with even more detail and bass extension for some time now. Following recent conversations with PMC´s designers, Senna agreed to call in to the company factory to try out early production models of PMC´s new AML2 compact active monitor when he was next in the UK. Senna made a trip to the PMC HQ between training sessions at the Silverstone track in July and met PMC´s Chief Designer and co-founder Pete Thomas in addition to trying out the new AML2s. Conversation ranged from the latest in carbon-fibre technology and its application to the construction of lightweight racing cars and speaker drivers to, well… lots of further discussion about fast cars! When it came to the AML2 audition, Senna was impressed. "How do you get a big monitor sound like that from such small speakers?" he wondered. As he headed back to Silverstone, his parting words were, "These are the best nearfield monitors I´ve heard — they´re going on my shopping list!"
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“I need that consistent, accurate sound that only PMC can offer me.” In the world of film-score recording and record mixing, Robert “Bobby” Fernandez is nothing short of a legend. Having worked at Warner Bros’ landmark Eastwood Scoring Stage in Burbank for 16 years, in 1995 he embarked upon a highly successful career as a first-call independent scoring and remix engineer. When the time came recently to add a third set of reference monitors at his Secret Studio facility, the choice for Fernandez was never in doubt: an LCR array of PMC TB2S-A MkII Active Reference Monitors. “I wouldn’t think of installing anything but PMC,” the veteran scoring/remix engineer states. “I already use IB1S Reference Monitors as my main monitors for remixing film scores and other projects, in addition to three MB2S Reference Monitors loaded into custom road cases that I take to my scoring sessions. I need that consistent, accurate sound that only PMC can offer me. The TB2S was an obvious choice.”
To read the entire article please follow this link: SCORING MIXER ROBERT “BOBBY” FERNANDEZ ADDS LCR ARRAY OF PMC TB2S-AII
Fernandex has worked on the following films using PMC speakers - Role Models Changeling Spider-Man 3 The Pursuit of Happyness Untraceable Gran Torino
“The system is a major contribution to our new facility” - Paul Eachus, Director of Audio Services.As the oldest continuously operating conservatory of music in the United States, Ohio-based Oberlin College offers a number of undergraduate majors, including private study in 32 areas, in addition to concert halls, practice rooms and teaching studios. So when the time came to outfit the Joseph R. Clonick Recording Studio and control room with surround-sound loudspeakers, Oberlin looked to the best: PMC Reference Monitors.“We selected a pair of MB2S-XBD cabinets for left and right channels, plus an MB2S-C for the center,” explains the Oberlin’s Director of Audio Services, Paul Eachus. “We went for PMC because our MB2S system offers a very large sound stage in terms of both width as well as height – the image extends far beyond the system’s physical dimensions. Which means that our students can work throughout the room on tracking and mixing sessions and not lose that essential sweet spot. MB2S offers life-like reproduction, just as if the band was right there in the room with you. The PMC system is a major contribution to our new facility.” The studio is housed in the conservatory’s new Bertram and Judith Kohl Building.To read the entire article please go to: OBERLIN COLLEGE CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC INSTALLS STATE-OF-THE-ART PMC
PMC launched their new cutting-edge digitally active ATL™ reference loudspeakers, the IB2S-A and the twin-cabinet IB2S XBD-A, on May 23rd 2010, at the AES Exhibtion in Hammersmith, London. The stand-alone IB2S-A and its twin-cabinet version, the IB2S XBD-A, offer discerning users the attributes of PMC’s large ATL™ reference active monitors in a more compact form, creating the ideal monitors for high-end reference monitoring and mastering applications.
The three-way IB2S-A master cabinet may be purchased as a speaker in its own right, or together with the single-driver XBD bass cabinet to form the IB2S XBD-A system, following the pattern established by the popular BB5-XBD-A reference monitor. The XBD bass unit adds +3dB of low-frequency headroom, makes for a smoother room reponse and allows users to drive even larger acoustic environments. Where an independent .1 sub channel monitor is required, an additional XBD active unit is the ideal solution.
Both DSP-controlled, Class-D powered cabinets make use of PMC’s ATL™ (Advanced Transmission Line) bass-loading technology, providing a smoothly controlled, high-resolution low-frequency response. The bass units in both cabinets, which are identical, feature the 10-inch carbon-fibre/Nomex™ piston drivers from the renowned IB1S and IB2S speakers, while the IB2S-A cabinet features PMC’s hand-built 75mm fabric-dome driver to handle the mid range and the 34mm soft-dome tweeter from the BB5 XBD-A. 960W of independent, audiophile-quality power is available to each active master cabinet: 200W for the high-frequency and mid-range drivers, with 560W directed to the LF driver for extended, low-distortion precision monitoring all the way down to 20Hz.
To read the entire article, please follow this link: PURE AUDIO, PMC UNVEIL THE IB2S-A and IB2 XBD-A
