London-based production music company West One Music Group has purchased a pair of PMC twotwo.8 nearfield monitors for the Soho-based facility.
The independent West One Music Group composes and creates music in almost any genre for television, films, corporate presentations, adverts and gaming.
Music is mainly recorded in-house, utilizing studios in the basement of the company’s Soho HQ when space allows. For larger live sessions, other locations are used, such as the Cadogan Hall and AIR Studios.
Most of the output of West One Music Group’s various production music labels is also mixed and mastered in their own studios, and it is here that the PMC twotwo.8s have been installed, as Chris Brown explains.
Brown is head of production at West One Music Group’s Fired Earth Music label, which specializes in music for Hollywood film trailers.
“Everything comes through our Percy Street HQ for quality control; we pride ourselves on only putting out releases that have been cared for by us all the way through production as far as mastering. We have larger soffit-mounted main speakers here, but we wanted some nearfields for critical listening when mixing and mastering. We auditioned various monitors. I was keen to try the twotwos, as I have been a PMC fan for a while.”
Brown previously worked for a spell at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions in Los Angeles, and got to hear PMCs in the studios there belonging to British film-score composers Henry Jackman and Dominic Lewis. “Henry and Dominic work on IB2s, and I just started to notice the difference whenever I went in their rooms. It’s like taking a blanket off the speakers. You hear everything; it’s just a joy.”
The other place Brown regularly ran into PMC speakers was at Fluid Mastering, West One Music Group’s go-to out-of-house mastering engineers. Fluid use both twotwo nearfields and also the mighty PMC BB5 XBD-As. “We handle most of our mastering here,” continues Chris Brown, “but when something really challenging comes up, we go to Tim Debney at Fluid. We’ve worked with him for a while and he always understands what we need and how to deliver it. And those BB5s are some of the best loudspeakers I’ve ever heard.”
The twotwo.8s at West One Music Group are now run in, and Brown is enjoying working on them. “Our other speakers here are great, but you do have to drive them, and if you listen to everything loud, it can be incredibly fatiguing after a while. The PMCs offer something very different. Monitoring on them low is great. You can listen at almost no volume and still be able to hear the detail, the definition in the bass that you need when mixing. So now we use the mains to play tracks loud to clients when they visit, and use the PMCs for most of the critical stuff we do.
“All in all, we’re very happy with the PMCs,” concludes Chris. “I just wish we could have some larger ones in here.”
