Composer Jeff Rona Built a Surprisingly Compact Dolby ATMOS Studio With Mackie

Composer and musician Jeff Rona jumped at the chance to build his own Dolby ATMOS mixing room at his personal studio. Now, sitting in the finished product, Rona couldn’t be happier with the results—and the Mackie speakers that helped make it possible.

 

Rona’s career began in the record business, as a synthesizer and drum machine programmer. He later met Hans Zimmer and worked with him on movies including Mission Impossible, The Lion King, and dozens more. Since then, Rona has scored hundreds of episodes of television, dozens of films, and dozens of major video game titles including God of War III and Devil May Cry 5.

 

“We got into Dolby ATMOS a couple years ago on the behest of a major record label that we were doing some work with. We decided to use that as an opportunity to build out our own ATMOS room,” said Rona, speaking from his studio in Topanga Canyon, California. “Right behind the studio here was a little building, like a cabin, and it was exactly the right size.”

 

For Rona, the Dolby ATMOS standard is more than just “the next big thing” for record labels—it’s part of a long-running artistic goal of creating immersive experiences. 

 

“Music went from mono to stereo more than a half a century ago. Since then, musicians and record producers have looked at ways to make music more engaging, more encompassing. The envelope has really been pushed on how to make music feel immersive, how to make people feel that they are in the music. There's something about that experience that is very emotional.”

 

There are also engineering benefits to using ATMOS, because it eliminates the need to mix separate channels for each speaker. Instead, the standard creates a three-dimensional digital room where individual tracks can be moved around. As long as the audience is listening through an ATMOS system, they will always hear these “objects” exactly where the mixer places them.

 

“With ATMOS, you have all of these object tracks that are these individual instruments or sound effects that honestly make mixing so much easier,” said Brandon Seliga, Rona’s in-house audio engineer. “Instead of worrying about how these sounds interact within your summed-down bus, you have an infinite amount of possibilities of where these things can be in the room. They are independent of each other.”

 

But to build the actual mixing room, Rona and Seliga faced a specific challenge: finding a full set of matching speakers that fit into their limited space, without compromising accuracy and sound quality. There’s also the matter of cost, which can be high even for a well-funded operation, since Dolby ATMOS doesn’t let you skimp on the speakers at the sides and back.

 

“People doing surround have never minded putting less expensive speakers in the surrounds, because you're not going to have anything with dynamic range in your surrounds, you're not going to have transients. But with ATMOS, it's about the consistency,” Rona said, explaining the unique challenge of finding all-around monitors that meet the standard. “Part of the ATMOS spec is that you don't have good speakers in the front and crappy speakers in the back.”

 

Mackie speakers ended up being the perfect choice. Rona had them in mind from the beginning, after years of using Mackie and getting excellent results.

 

“We definitely wanted speakers that we knew that we had some familiarity with. And I've used Mackie speakers on various projects in different rooms,” Rona said. “These speakers nail a really interesting sweet spot, being that they're extremely high-quality reference speakers”

 

However, Rona and Seliga still did their due diligence in choosing their ATMOS speakers. They considered other brands, taking the time to hear them in different rooms. In the end, Mackie won out for its transparency, the most essential ingredient for any professional mixing monitor.

 

“We wanted to make a really good decision about our speakers. We toured different rooms listening to how different speakers sounded. Mackie just always stuck out. Mackie is so flat, it's so transparent,” Rona said about the decision, which they did not take lightly. “The sound has been remarkable. Everybody who comes to the studio is blown away.”

 

Their new Dolby ATMOS room includes a total of 11 speakers, with four mounted overhead and seven placed at ear level, all top-of-the-line Mackie HR624mk2 active two-way monitors. There are also two MRS10 subwoofers filling in the low end.

 

“They're very compact, but they're full range, bulletproof speakers. We absolutely love them,” said Rona of the HR624mk2. “The speakers at ear level form a near perfect ring around the listener/mixer, and then the overheads are basically a second ring so that you're creating this dome that envelops you and you're in the center of this sphere of sound and music. While you can listen to ATMOS with a smaller number of speakers, this room is the ideal number of speakers: seven at ear level, four overhead, one or two woofers.”

 

Even for a seasoned professional like Rona, the results have exceeded expectations.

 

“This room delivers 100% of the ATMOS experience… it shows what you can do with a modest space, with a limited budget, and you want the sound to be impactful.”

 

For confirmation, Rona invited some professional peers from a nearby facility that mixes in Dolby ATMOS for big names including Netflix and HBO. The crew came down and listened in the new space. They were so impressed that they had no feedback—the room was done.

 

“We brought them for criticism, for advice. How can we tweak anything about the system, the distances, the layout, the angles? I really wanted them to say, ‘Here's what you need to do to make it better.’ And they just said, this room sounds unbelievable,” Rona said, joking that he was almost disappointed that the room was so perfect and the journey was complete.

 

“But how gratifying, to know that you can build a phenomenal ATMOS space on a budget and with relatively tight constraints,” he concluded.

 

For more information on Dolby ATMOS mixing, check out our detailed guide to setting up a high-quality, affordable ATMOS room in your own studio.