PMC twotwos Join MB2S-Actives At SSR

Manchester's SSR (School of Sound Recording) have completed running in a recently purchased set of PMC's twotwo.6 monitors. The new speakers replaced an ageing set of Yamaha NS10s in SSR's digital mixing suite, a compact mix facility based around a DigiCo console.

Tom Aston, SSR's Technical Director, explains the school's choice. "We've been looking at replacing the NS10s in the Digico Studio for some time; we wanted to give our students access to some of the new generation of nearfield monitors that are utilising the latest digital signal processing and crossovers."

The active twotwo range is PMC's new three-strong family of two-way reference-grade monitors, combining the company's low-distortion ATL™ bass-loading technology with digital inputs. PMC had an existing relationship with the Manchester school dating back to 2009, when the larger MB2S-Active monitors were installed in the Spirit recording studio, SSR's flagship recording facility — so when SSR heard about the launch of the twotwos at the AES show in San Francisco last Autumn, they decided to audition them.

After a successful trial in the Spirit studio, the school bought the pair of twotwo.6s and installed them permanently in the DigiCo Studio. Tom Aston:  "The twotwos seem to fit sonically much better with the room than the NS10s did. We'll connect them digitally, via the AES3 input when we get the remote, which will mean our mixing chain only has one D-A conversion: in the speakers."

Adam Stokel, a former SSR student who now works as a Studio Assistant at SSR, was an early adopter of the twotwos, following years of experience mixing on the MB2S-As in the Spirit studio. "It took a while to get used to the MB2S-As, because I'd never heard that kind of detail before - it was like someone had 'cleaned a window', particularly in the upper mids. We have NS10s in so many other rooms in the building, you get used to those. With the MB2S-As, it was like a quilt had been pulled off the speakers. I was most impressed with the new twotwos as well, especially as when I first heard them, they'd only been out of their boxes for about ten hours. I'd just finished working on an aggressive punk-rock EP, and I was instantly impressed by what I heard. It's very easy to make that kind of music sound too spiky and harsh, and then it takes your head off, but not in a good way. On the twotwo.6s, it came out sounding really powerful with a dense, even 'press' of frequencies across the spectrum."

Adam is not the only SSR user to be impressed, as Tom Aston relates. "We've had great feedback from staff and students. They’ve been impressed with the power that comes out of a cabinet of this size, the detail that is audible across the entire frequency spectrum, and that PMC seem to have captured the same precision that you get from the MB2S-As, but in a much smaller box."