Headliner can exclusively reveal that London’s Dean St. Studios has transformed its Studio 2 room into the UK’s first dedicated Dolby Atmos mastering room.
The development comes two years after Dean St. transformed its main Studio 1 control room into a Dolby Atmos recording and mixing room.
PMC monitoring features in both rooms, with the new mastering suite kitted out with a 9.1.4 surround system comprising PMC’s MB3-XBD-A monitors for left and right main channels, MB3S-A for the centre channel and Ci Series Ci65 monitors for surround and height channels.
Jasmin Lee, who along with her mother Suzanne Lee-Barnes, has owned Dean St. Studios since 2007, commented: “We were the first independent music recording facility in the UK to install a Dolby Atmos studio for music mixing and we are now also the first to recognise that this format needs a specialist approach to mastering. To that end we have built an acoustically accurate room that can cater specifically for this market, and we have equipped it with monitors that are so detailed and clear that our engineers can hear every nuance of the tracks they are working on, even at very low volumes.”
According to Lee, two things are vital when it comes to mastering in Dolby Atmos – having a room with a high end 9.1.4 monitoring system that is built specifically for mastering, and having engineers who understand surround mastering and can apply that expertise to mastering projects in immersive audio.