When Julien Maurel and Sébastien Petit launched Sodasound from a suburban garage outside Paris in 2011, they believed passionately in reimagining the studio experience. Thirteen years later, the duo operates from central Paris, having spent two years painstakingly transforming a former automobile workshop into their dream facility. Part of that dream was to install PMC monitoring, including a Dolby Atmos setup, and multiple systems have been supplied by PMC’s French distributor Studio Dealers, conveniently located near Sodasound in the Place de la Réunion.
“After more than 10 years of renting various studios we were lucky enough to be able to buy our own 200m² facility, which we started from scratch: concept, design, acoustics, ergonomics, integration,” explains Julien, a sound engineer of 15 years who met Petit while studying audio engineering, and who describes their first facility as a big home studio. “From the start, we offered our services at the fairest price, ploughing the revenue back into new gear,” he recalls. “We worked in this way for 10 years, recording, producing, mixing, mastering and building a solid reputation.” Finding themselves cramped, they moved into a temporary studio, +XXX, continuing to work for two years while simultaneously building the new facility.
Sodasound’s first PMC purchase while at +XXX was a pair of the twin cabinet MB2S XBD – also its first investment in a main monitoring system. “It fitted perfectly with the sound we were looking for: natural, very deep and defined in the bass, remaining neutral but with a big impact, says Julien. “PMC gives us the feeling of a very detailed sound stage and imaging.”
Those speakers now take pride of place in Sodasound’s mixing and mastering facility, Studio ⓢ2. “We really loved the depth and subtlety that they provide and absolutely wanted to keep them as main monitors in ⓢ2,” he continues. “They are very pleasing and precise; they suit the room’s acoustic perfectly, so we use them with almost no EQ correction.”
Studio ⓢ1, used mainly for recording and mixing live musicians, has been installed with a pair of PMC ci45 speakers as reference monitors in its live room. Things get really interesting in Studio ⓢ4, a Dolby Atmos and multichannel room, which has an PMC6 XBD as LCR with two PMC8 SUBs, four ci45s for the surrounds and four ci30s as overhead channels. “For Studio ⓢ4, we wanted to go with PMC again,” explains Julien. “At first, we thought about a setup with the twotwo.6 or twotwo.8, but then, PMC released the 6’s with an XBD, which seemed to offer even more definition. We combined them with four ci45 and four ci30 speakers, according to our space constraints, and they fitted in perfectly. The multichannel monitoring system is a great solution for the room, considering its compact size. It blends very well with the acoustic treatment and the response is great, allowing us to work for long period of time without fatigue.”
Julien was grateful for the opportunity to design the Atmos room from scratch. “It gives much better results than installing this type of monitoring into an existing room,” he says, adding that Sodasound has been operating a 5.1 studio for years, mixing commercials, documentaries and immersive music for films. “We believe that mixing in Atmos for music will develop strongly with the rise of streaming platforms, and that demand will only keep growing. We are also convinced that sound is becoming more and more immersive, with innovations such as the metaverse, VR headsets and increased production values for movies and TV series. We are now well-positioned for this new market.”
More than 10 people now work at Sodasound, which offers a wide range of audio services. Julien himself boasts a stellar career in mastering, having worked on several thousand tracks and dozens of albums. Starting out in electronic and urban music, he now works across a broad spectrum of genres. “Thanks to my background and Sodasound’s notoriety, I have established myself in the French market,” he says. The new facility gives the Sodasound team a platform from which to further expand its offerings and increase its expertise.
For more about Sodasound, Paris see: https://sodasound.fr/
For more about PMC’s reference monitoring see: https://pmc-speakers.com/studio/