The Graduate Program in Sound Recording at McGill University in Montreal recently added Harman’s JBL Professional M2 master reference monitors at the Schulich School of Music.
At the school, area chair Richard King (a Grammy winner) and associate professor George Massenburg (noted recording producer/engineer and 4-time Grammy winner) both serve on the faculty for the Graduate Program In Sound Recording, one of the only programs in North America that offers both a Master’s and Ph.D degree.
The program covers all aspects of recording from old to new, and follows the European Tonmeister tradition of training musicians to become sound engineers.
“I go back a long way with Peter Chaikin of JBL, and a few years ago I heard what was then a speaker in development that blew me away,” explains Massenburg. “A few years later I found out the speaker had evolved to become the M2. Naturally, I wanted to hear the finished version. It was a transformative experience.”
Late last year, the Schulich School of Music purchased three JBL M2 monitors, which are installed in the school’s main studio in a left-center-right configuration. “One of the main reasons we picked the M2 is because this room is critical to our operations–we run it 24/7 here,” King notes. The room is used for a multitude of activities including teaching recording and mixing, conducting listening analysis measurements and advanced training programs.
“The first thing we teach our students is how to listen,” he adds, “so we need the most transparent loudspeaker available that lets them hear the most accurate representation possible of the mix. Now that we have the JBL M2 we know that’s exactly what they’re hearing.”
The facility does a lot of work in virtual acoustics and studying reverberation characteristics. “As you can imagine, being able to hear the most minute sonic detail is critical,” King says. “A monitor as accurate and revealing across the entire frequency spectrum as the M2 is invaluable for this kind of work.
“We don’t want the loudspeaker to get in the way of the mixing process, and the M2 gets out of the way more than any other speaker we’ve heard,” he continues. “We want to hear the most transparent playback possible so our students can properly choose everything else in the recording chain, and be confident that they’re hearing a faithful representation of the effect of that equipment chain. The M2 lets us hear the most exacting sonic aspects of the production.”
Massenburg concludes, “If our students’ mixes don’t sound good, we know it’s not because of the speaker.”
