MAURICE PATIST: Hi. My name is Maurice Patist from PMC, the Professional Monitoring Company. We’re here today at the Audio Engineering Society in San Francisco. We have been asked to talk a little bit our products and about our company.

Professional Monitoring Company was founded about 20 years ago by Peter Thomas, an ex-BBC engineer, who decided to build loudspeakers for the BBC where they were looking for a system that was capable of the fidelity that you would find in a hi-fi system and the loudness and SPL that you would find in, for instance at that time, a Cerwin-Vega PA system. By combining those two, we actually came up with our first monitoring system for the BBC, which was the BB5 which is still in the air by the way.

What we have here today are two surround setups of two models that we have. One of them is our MB2, the Medium Box three-way monitoring system based on a 12” bass driver with a 75-mm soft dome mid range and a silk soft dome tweeter. It’s all hand-built by ourselves in London, U.K. I want to make that very clear since we want to have absolute quality control over all our products and especially the matching of our products.

What we also have here is one of our later products that we have built for another company called Digidesign you’re probably familiar with. It’s also based on our advanced Transmission Line Technology that we use throughout all our speakers. That’s the chosen design that we have used for the last 20 years and that’s how we became successful, very different from a lot of other speaker designs that are out there on the market, whether they are bass reflex or sealed boxes.

The benefit that we have with the transmission line is that’s basically a tunnel line within the cabinet that controls the air and allows us for having bigger efficiency over our drive units. It also is dampened within the cabinets with different types of foam which is absorbing all the upper bass, mid, and high frequencies in the cabinet so that there’s far less distortion and colorization coming out in the front, which is preferable obviously in a mixing or a mastering environment.

The other benefit is that at the end of the transmission line, this model, it’s on the top of the speaker and this model, it’s on the bottom of the speaker, is that whatever comes out at the bottom off or at the end of the tunnel are only the lower bass frequencies. The rest, well, as I just mentioned, are absorbed within the cabinet. What comes out here is also exactly in phase with the bass driver that is positioned above it so we kind of create a virtual second bass driver by doing that. It allows us to go an extra octave lower in the bass response and it also gives us a higher SPL in the bass response. So, a lot of people are also amazed as how it’s possible for us to have out of such a tiny box such a bass response. Well, the secret to that is indeed our design, the transmission line where we are very unique in using that.

There’s actually no other monitoring company at the moment that used this design because it’s very, very expensive to design. It takes a long, long time. There’s no computer program for it. It’s all hand work.

The system that we have here is based on a 6-1/2” bass driver and again a soft-dome tweeter, transmission line built-in. It’s a fully active system where we use a class D amplifier. The specifications that Digidesign gave is where they wanted to - their first speaker to go to. It’s called the RM for Reference Monitor. This is the RM2. We also have a smaller model with a 5” bass driver and that is the RM1.

Over time, we have enabled, in the last 20 years, to establish ourselves at the real high-end level in the high-end audio industry, whether it has been for either mastering, for recording, for mixing, tracking, plus we have been in basically any type of studio, regardless of the type of music. A lot of manufacturers out there might have great speakers for instance for classical music, but if you try to play any rock, hip hop, or let’s say metal on it, it won’t do that so great. To us, that is unacceptable. The speaker has no idea what you put into it, so whatever we put in it has to come out, and that is exactly what this speaker does. It’s no-nonsense, it’s very direct, it will give you what you need to hear, and that’s at the end of the day the purpose of it because it’s a tool for an engineer.

As we said, we have here a model, the MB2, the Medium Box: 12” bass driver, 75-mm mid range, anda tweeter. We have this in our surround setup where we have a matching center channel which is what we do exactly for all our models in our range from our smallest DB1 near-field to our biggest BB5 XBD 7 feet tall. For this surround setup, we have chosen different rear channels, purely to give people an idea of what’s possible with our systems with regard to mixing and matching. If we look at the rear channel on that side, you will find the IB2, which is a system that has not the 12” but the 10” bass driver, the same mid range, and the same tweeter as we utilized in the MB2 that we have on the front which will allow us to have perfect timbre matching but still have a full-range model at the back and it can be used as such for both stereo and surround.

If I look to the other model that we have out here, the RM2, we decided to put a full-arm, two surround system up here. Although this is a near-field system, the surround channels are about 20 feet away so we can cover this in a presentation for more than 50 people. People have a hard time at the moment, when we do our demo, to distinguish which speaker is playing so that tells you a little bit about the performance of our tiny speakers. If anybody would be interested ever to hear that, please check us on our web site. It’s PMC-Speakers.com. Please contact us whether it’s in the United States or in Europe or anywhere else, and we’ll be delighted to tell you more about our products and hopefully you would like to give them a try.