GAT3, an audio facility in Charlotte, NC established more than 25 years ago by Glenn A Tabor III and his wife Susan, recently transformed a former stereo tracking room into a 9.1.6 Dolby Atmos immersive studio that’s equipped with PMC Ci series monitors.
The facility has five studios handling a range of audio projects, including music recording, mixing, mastering, voiceovers, ADR and post production for film and television. It also has two sound stages, two video stages and a recording academy, teaching the next generation of audio engineers the skills of their trade.
Each of the facility’s studios are named after a precious stone (Opal, Onyx, Ruby, Emerald and Sapphire), and take their interior décor colour palette from the colour of the stone they represent. GAT3’s new Dolby Atmos facility, called the Sapphire Room, will soon be headed up by mix engineer Richard Chycki, who is relocating from Toronto to join the company.
“We decided to upgrade the Sapphire Room to Dolby Atmos because many of our customers were asking for album projects to be mixed in this format and we needed a state-of-the-art facility that would allow us to satisfy these demands,” says Tabor. “The decision to install a PMC monitoring system was an easy one to make. I’d heard PMC speakers in many other studios and had always loved them because they are so precise. As an audiophile who has been into HiFi from a very young age, I felt there was only one brand that could deliver the accuracy of a mastering room without sacrificing musicality, and that was PMC. It’s a very fine line to balance, but PMC manages to achieve it perfectly.”
GAT3’s PMC set includes Ci140 monitors for the LCR, four Ci140 subwoofers and 12 Ci65 monitors for the surround and height channels. “We chose PMC Ci140 speakers because we wanted the entire front wall to look curved,” Tabor adds. “I’m a big fan of soffit-mounted monitors and what we have achieved is, in essence, a soffit-mounted look. The monitors, however, are actually floating inside the wall, on springs and in their own stand-alone cabinets.”
Based on the recommendation of Maurice Patist (president of PMC USA and head of pro global), Tabor opted for three of the new PMC 750-8 eight-channel power amplifiers stated to deliver up to 750 watts per channel. GAT3 is now the first studio to install these amps and Tabor says they have performed up to expectations.
“They are fantastic – we love them” he says. “They are the perfect match for the Ci Series because they are accurate and also musical. They don’t sound sterile or harsh in any way. I’m also a big fan of the fully featured DSP control, and the fact that it is really quick and easy to adjust EQ for each channel using System Engineer software. We’ve downloaded the software onto a tablet, and this means we can check routing and many other parameters very easily.”
