Alan Moulder buys PMC twotwo.8s

Respected UK producer, engineer, and mixing specialist Alan Moulder (Nine Inch Nails, The Killers, Arctic Monkeys, Foals) has bought a pair of PMC twotwo.8 monitors for his personal mix room, based at Assault and Battery Studios in North-west London. Moulder began to really notice PMCs when working at Trent Reznor's studio on Nine Inch Nails' 2013 Hesitation Marks album. "Of course, I'd heard about them, and working on Trent's album, I liked them a lot." Reznor has been a user of both PMC MB2 XBD-A midfields and AML2 nearfields for several years.

In early 2014, Assault and Battery Studios obtained a pair of the largest speakers in PMC’s twotwo nearfield series, the twotwo.8s, for evaluation. After his experience mixing Nine Inch Nails on PMCs, Moulder wanted to try them. "I've got used to working with certain monitors over the years," he admits, "so I didn't really want to like the PMCs… but I instantly did! They don't have a hyped sound — they're very flat — but they are very detailed, even at low volumes, which I like. I will often spend a long time working on very sonically dense tracks, and you can't crank the speakers too loud all the time when you're working like that."

From his earliest work, Moulder has had a reputation for producing great results when tracking and mixing very full arrangements. "It's true!" he reflects. "If people have massive track counts, they come to me. I never seem to get minimal stuff to work on…! But that means I need speakers that can give you detail. With the twotwo.8s, you still get the full picture, even at low levels… the response is consistent at different volumes, and you can still hear the bottom end in full."

Moulder's twotwo.8s were installed in his studio at Assault and Battery in the early summer. His first sizeable project with them was premixing tracks in August on Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's soundtrack album for the smash success film thriller Gone Girl, released in October 2014. The mixing on the soundtrack was completed on the PMCs at Reznor's studio in LA.