If you’ve ever fancied using the kind of speakers the professionals have in studios, mastering suites and radio stations, look no further than PMC: the Professional Monitor Company name says it all, and it was founded by the Manager of BBC Music Studios and an engineer from pro-audio company FWO Bauch – Pete Thomas and Adrian Loader – back at the beginning of the 1990s.
The story behind the brand is a familiar one – the two were dissatisfied with the existing speakers available for studio and home use, and fortunately they weren’t alone: their first design, the BB5 speaker, was immediately sold to the BBC.
Using transmission line technology – a folded acoustic ‘tunnel’ within the speaker to tune the bass –, the company rapidly developed its first domestic speaker, the LB1, alongside that BB5 for pro use, and over the past 40+ years PMC has continued to be a reference for studios and musicians, while also developing speakers for music-lovers to use at home.
BBC approval
It made a good start, with its BB5s being installed in the BBC’s Maida Vale Studios, complete with built-in active amplification, where they’ve been used for recordings for all the national radio networks, from classical concerts the famous John Peel Sessions. Another early adopter was London’s Metropolis Mastering, responsible for a huge number of hit recordings, and these days PMC speakers are used worldwide in pro applications, from leading Hollywood scoring studios to the recording set-ups of top musicians. The larger MB1s and BB5 XBD-A active systems are a studio standard, with high-profile musicians including Queen guitarist Brian May, Prince, Robbie Williams and Stevie Wonder buying them for their own studios.
All of the company’s speakers, and indeed the components within them, are handmade in the UK, and that extends to PMC’s domestic speakers, the first floorstanding model for home use, the FB1, appearing in 1999. The range expanded with the little DB1 model, which is still in production, and the larger OB1 and EB1, while professional applications grew to include Teldex in Germany, recording for Deutsche Grammophon and Harmonia Mundi, plus the BBC’s London Radio Theatre and its Sound 1 OB truck, used to cover the likes of Glastonbury and the Reading Festival.
For the home
With more home speaker systems being launched to mark its 20th and 25th anniversaries, PMC has now turned to making its studio monitor technology available to an even wider range of hi-fi enthusiasts: its prodigy1 and 5 speakers are built and tested to the same standards as its more expensive home and pro speakers – and not surprisingly are making real waves for their combination of performance and value.
