USER STORY
Kurt Martinez has mixed Dolby Atmos records for artists including Central Cee, Kylie Minogue, Louis Tomlinson and WILLOW, and was shortlisted for the Music Producers Guild’s Dolby Atmos Mixer of the Year award. A year ago, he stepped away from commercial studios and built his own Atmos room from scratch in his garden in Kent, with PMC monitoring, calibrated heights and rears, and full control over the space.
Having built that trust once, inside four walls, Kurt is now working out how to take a version of it with him.
Kurt’s process was never built around the room alone. Before anything goes to a label, he checks how a mix translates across as many consumer formats as he can reach. This includes the Dolby Binaural Re-Render for how a mix will play back on Amazon and Tidal, Audiomovers’ Binaural Renderer for how it’ll play back on Apple Music, various soundbar configurations, AirPods Max, and a Dolby-certified 11.1.6 room at PMC.
Some of that discipline is about protecting the format itself. In Kurt’s view, a mix that’s dressed up to tick a box rather than genuinely using the format is common enough to put a casual listener off spatial audio the first time they hear one, which is something he’s very careful not to add to. Some of it is future-proofing: checking against systems more capable than today’s 7.1.4 consumer ceiling, so a decade of work doesn’t need remastering once playback catches up.
SR1 has become part of that same discipline. It’s another physical reference he can trust, closer to how his room actually behaves than headphones or a soundbar ever get.
A lot of Kurt’s frustration with lower-quality Atmos work comes down to a specific shortcut: engineers producing spatial mixes that are really stereo mixes with wide backing vocals and a bit of reverb, built to satisfy quality control rather than to use the format properly.
What SR1 gives him that a standard headphone reference can’t is physical placement. With eight discrete channels reproduced across dedicated drivers, he can solo the rears, the sides, the heights individually, and hear exactly where each element sits rather than infer it from a binaural setting.
That physical placement isn’t abstract. On a typical session, Kurt keeps drums left and right as they sit in the stereo mix, then sends a drum reverb up into the heights to fake a room around the kit — distant mic’d, roughed up with a bit of distortion. In binaural, he knows what that’s meant to sound like. But on SR1, he can actually hear it sitting behind him.
The wider industry is moving in the same direction. Dolby’s renderer recently added the ability to solo and mute individual objects directly in an ADM file — previously something only possible inside Pro Tools itself. For Kurt, it’s a sign that discrete, physical checking is becoming standard practice, not a novelty specific to one piece of hardware.
There’s a workflow difference too, not just a listening one. Checking a mix on AirPods Max means bouncing a binaural render or an MP4 first, a step that breaks the flow of an active session. With SR1 connected directly, Kurt can audition changes inside Pro Tools itself, live, without rendering anything first.
Client work doesn’t pause for travel, and increasingly, neither does Kurt’s process. While finishing a record away from Kent, he spent a couple of mornings working from a laptop, a stereo headphone reference and the binaural render alone, with no multichannel reference of any kind. He’s now building SR1 into that same setup, so the next time he’s away from Kent — in a hotel room during a conference like NAMM, or wherever a project happens to follow him — he can work with a genuine spatial reference rather than binaural alone.
Even smaller moments of friction have started disappearing. Rather than walking out to the studio to prepare a session, Kurt has started working straight from a laptop and SR1 at his kitchen table. The same reference, without needing to be physically in the room to access it.
That trust matters most in the moments where a decision can’t wait for the room. One automation choice on a recent record sounded right in binaural, but Kurt didn’t hear it confirmed against a physical room until the mix was already finished. It came out the way he wanted, but he’s clear that hearing a decision, rather than hoping it translates, is the difference SR1 is closing.
Kurt’s remote review process on the Louis Tomlinson record ran largely through live-streamed binaural sessions with producer Nico, based in Berlin while Kurt worked from Kent. This included approvals given from Majorca, on holiday, over two phones at once.
Asked what would change if Nico’s side of that conversation had a genuine multichannel reference instead of a binaural render, Kurt sees more room for detail, not less. A reverb sitting only in the height channel — the kind of specific spatial choice that got a strong reaction from Nico on that project — becomes something he could isolate and demonstrate directly, rather than describe.
It’s a use case Kurt sees value in more broadly. Labels could supply SR1 directly to artists for approval, provided it stays simple enough to use without touching a setting. Stick the headphones on, play the file, and the artist is hearing the same reference the engineer built the mix around.
For Kurt, that consistency is the point. Whether it’s a label reviewing a mix in another city, or Kurt himself finishing a record from somewhere other than his own studio, SR1 means the reference doesn’t change even when the room does.
The decisions made away from Kent carry the same confidence as the ones made in it.
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