The journey started when Dale Chapman from SX Pro suggested that we needed to take Dolby Atmos seriously and arranged for us to visit PMC Studio London.

We went into the demonstration knowing that the room was going to sound good. PMC have a formidable reputation in professional monitoring, and a purpose-built demonstration room is naturally designed to show a monitoring system at its best.

What we weren't expecting was just how significant the difference would feel.

One of the first tracks we heard was Imagine Dragons' Believer. I knew the song extremely well because at the time it was one of my daughter's favourite tracks, so I'd heard it more times than I could count.

Hearing it in Dolby Atmos was completely different. The track suddenly opened up around us and, when the chorus arrived, the scale and emotion of the presentation was unlike anything I'd experienced from music before.

The demonstration made the sonic decision relatively easy, but there were several practical reasons why the PMC Ci Series made so much sense for our room.

We weren't simply placing speakers into an existing studio. The entire room was being designed and constructed specifically for Dolby Atmos, which meant every centimetre mattered.

We wanted the monitoring system to become part of the room itself, rather than having conventional speakers sitting on stands around the listening position.

One of the biggest advantages of the PMC Ci Series was their physical depth.

When designing the room, we needed to work within the required Dolby Atmos geometry while also creating enough space behind the finished walls for substantial acoustic treatment.

The largest Ci Series monitors we were using, the Ci140s, are only around 180 mm deep. A conventional monitor positioned on a speaker stand could easily occupy 400–500 mm of depth once the required distance from the wall is considered.

Integrating the PMC monitors directly into the structure therefore gave us potentially hundreds of millimetres of additional usable depth around the room. Instead of sacrificing that space to speaker cabinets and stands, we could use it for acoustic treatment.

In a purpose-built immersive room, that is a significant advantage.

There was another reason we wanted the speakers built into the room: they look incredible.

Studio monitors are usually chosen almost entirely for their performance, and rightly so. But when you're building a flagship studio from scratch, there is no reason the monitoring system can't sound exceptional and become a major part of the visual design at the same time.

At the front of our room, the wall-mounted Ci Series monitors are combined with two Ci140 subwoofers positioned either side of the centre channel.

The result is effectively a seven-speaker wall across the front of the studio. Visually it makes an immediate impact, but more importantly the system has enormous scale, dynamics and low-frequency punch.

One characteristic of the PMC Ci Series that became particularly apparent once the room was commissioned was how consistent the monitoring remained as you moved around the space.

With many monitoring systems, moving significantly away from the central listening position makes the change immediately obvious. The stereo image shifts, the frequency balance changes and you know you're outside the optimum listening area.

Our Atmos room behaves differently.

You can move around the studio and still feel surrounded by a coherent sound field. The easiest way I can describe it is that it feels like walking around inside a three-dimensional sphere of sound rather than listening to individual speakers positioned around you.

For Dolby Atmos, that characteristic is incredibly valuable because the entire purpose of the format is to create a convincing immersive environment.

Building a completely new immersive studio was obviously a significant investment, but we saw it as a calculated decision rather than simply buying new equipment.

The growing commitment to Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos from major streaming platforms made it clear that immersive audio was becoming increasingly important for music.

Audio Animals also works across film and television projects, so the room had applications beyond music alone.

We wanted to build the capability properly and position ourselves to work with the format as demand increased rather than waiting until Atmos had already become established.

SX Pro played a major part throughout the project, from introducing us to the PMC Atmos system through to supplying the equipment and helping commission the finished room.

Dale Chapman recommended the PMC Ci Series because the range suited both the physical dimensions of the studio and the performance requirements of the system.

Once construction was complete, the room was calibrated and commissioned around the finished speaker installation.

The support from PMC was another important part of the experience.

Our original visit to PMC Studio London gave us the opportunity to hear the system properly, ask questions and discuss the different configurations available before making a decision.

Since completing the installation, we've remained in regular contact with the UK PMC team, who have also visited Audio Animals to see and hear the finished system in operation.

Having access to people who understand both the products and professional immersive installations has been invaluable throughout the process.