AV Designs / PMC Dinner

AV Designs, the local distributor of PMC loudspeakers, hosted a dinner for PMC's Peter Thomas and Andy Duffield on their visit to our shores. Peter is the owner of PMC while Andy is the sales manager.

Due to work commitment, I missed the award/presentation/Q&A session at AV Designs' showroom (see Big E's earlier post), but caught up later for the dinner. Big E's 10Qs with Peter will be coming up soon. I, in the meantime, have a few photo shots from the dinner to share.

Peter fielding questions from our fellow blogger, Lam Seng Fatt of hi-fi avenue.
Lam was the most hardworking of the lot, furiously taking down everything that Peter imparted. Lam is sharing this information on his hi-fi avenue blog. Hop over there and have a good read!

Peter was generous with his insights, wisdom and experience. Does he not look like a wise shaman or a grand wizard? You could see the intensity and passion in him when he was talking about loudspeakers and audio

But Peter is a down to earth chap, easygoing and humorous. We had a good laugh with the many stories he told

Here we have Andy at the centre, flanked by our very own LS3/5A guru, Jo Ki, on the left, and the organizer of KLIAV, Dick Tan, on the right

James Tan of AV Designs gesturing while making a point (darn! Big E is blocked again from this camera angle!) ;-)

I told Peter I observed that PMC did not sound like other BBC-tradition loudspeakers, despite his own history of working for the BBC. Peter said that he did not design his loudspeakers specifically for BBC's recording studios. According to him, the BBC studios have excellent and standardized acoustic treatment; however, the standardized acoustic treatment design is such that there is less absorption in the midrange, thus loudspeakers for such an environment are built with a little trough in the midrange. When placed in a BBC studio, the loudspeaker's midrange response will be slightly lifted and cancel out the trough, a flat response is achieved thus in the room.

These BBC-tradition loudspeakers will give an impression of a midrange, vocal for example, that is recessed deep into the soundstage when used in a domestic environment (not exactly a bad thing, depending on your taste).

PMC loudspeakers, on the other hand, are designed to be used in the many other professional recording studios, where the acoustic treatment is done evenly. PMC's mission is to design a neutral sounding, flat-frequency-response loudspeaker, suited for producing a flat frequency response (what else?) in such an environment.

Through the night, I gathered that Peter's aim is none other than building a neutral loudspeaker which will let the music speak for itself.

There is no better embodiment of such a philosophy than the MB2-XBD active loudspeaker system currently on demo in AV Designs. Go listen, I bet you'd be mightily impressed, as was I, when I heard them a couple of weeks ago.

I leave you with these happy faces: