L to R: Adam Howard, Belinda Howard, Robin Kohl and boxes of the best damn PCM speakers.

In the past two years we’ve seen so much expanding from Howard Audio it’s been hard to keep up! Besides Adam Howard being ranked the top music Composer and Supervisor in 2020 at the Loeries, he’s also made some major moves for South Africa’s sound industry. First it was a Dolby Atmos 7.1.4 studio and now Adam has collaborated with heavy-hitter Robin Kohl of Jazzworx (who produces music records for top South African musicians such as AKA, Lira and Wizkid) to build a new immersive sound recording studio unlike we have ever seen. So obviously we have questions, four to be exact.

1. The last time we spoke about your studio upgrades, you had installed one of South Africa’s first Dolby Atmos mixing studios. Did it pay off?

Adam: It was one of the best moves we’ve ever made. Since building our first Dolby Atmos 7.1.4 audio room last year we have had the busiest year yet at Howard Audio. Apart from all the commercial work we do every day, like final mixing and original music compositions, we have delivered over 300 tracks for Apple Music and have been one of the first South African sound studios to mix a locally produced Netflix series in Dolby Atmos, titled Ludik (directed by Giant Films’ Ian Gabriel). We are also currently working on our second film with Ian, which we are beyond excited about. We saw how well the new immersive sound studio was doing, realised the need for another and decided to expand and build another immersive studio – with a huge live room to record musicians.

Waaaaait a minute, if you’re like us and ‘Atmos-this’, ‘Dolby-that’, ‘Immersive-sound-what-what’ sounds like a made-up language, then take a quick look at this vid and find out why you should give a damn. It’s a clip from the Zoom chat we had with Adam and of course, nobody talks about sound as eloquently as he does. Don’t expect Netflix quality production, this was pre-Fibre at our premises. …