High End 2019 • TABlog
peaker maker PMC packed its room several times a day for demonstrations of newly remastered versions of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain. For six years, PMC has enjoyed a relationship with Capitol Records, pursuant to which Capitol’s Recording Studio C is fitted with an array of PMC speakers set up for Dolby Atmos. Atmos is a surround-sound technology introduced in 2012 that allows the use of 128 tracks plus spatial cues contained in metadata. It requires a rather large room and lots of speakers, making your old 5.1-channel surround system seem a bit antiquated.
PMC fitted out its room in Munich with (by my visual count) 18 speakers. Playing back the surround sound and stereo versions of Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain for comparison, PMC had lots of heads nodding in favor of the surround-sound version, but Roy Gregory and I were left unimpressed. Yes, surround sounded bigger, but not at all in a way that also sounded like real instruments played by real people. Whether these recordings will see public release remains unclear. Perhaps this depends on whether public demonstrations elicit sufficient demand.
More interesting was the opportunity to meet some
interesting people brought in by PMC and Capitol to help promote the demonstration,
including a representative of the Miles Davis estate, a host of recording engineers, and
horn player Jane Ira Bloom (above), one of today’s top jazz players. |
