London, UK (March 8, 2022)—Seal’s eponymous first album has been remixed in Dolby Atmos by Trevor Horn, who produced the original album, and is being released 30 years after it debuted at No. 1 in the UK charts
Horn was invited to mix the Seal project at PMC Studio London by PMC studio manager Heff Moraes. A recording and mix engineer who began his career at Horn’s Sarm Studios back in 1984, Moraes is now based at PMC Studio London where he acts as a brand ambassador for PMC products and works closely with producers and artists to introduce them to the Dolby Atmos mixing process.
To create the Dolby Atmos Music mix of Seal, Horn and his engineer Tim Weidner spent three days at the facility. “I have always liked PMC speakers because they are very accurate and don’t color the sound,” Horn says. “In that way, they are like a scientific instrument — and one that can be relied on. Mixing in Atmos does require a lot of speakers and at present, my own studio isn’t set up for this. However, I am in the process of installing a Dolby Atmos system and this will incorporate PMC ci Series monitors.”
Mixing Carole King Christmas Album in Atmos is a Family Affair
Horn adds that while mixing in Atmos was straightforward, the biggest challenge the project faced was collating the original stereo multitracks for the Seal album. “It took a lot of time to track down the original tapes,” he explains. “We eventually found most of them, and what we didn’t have, we worked around by using 5.1 mixes or live recordings. This was my first experience of mixing in Dolby Atmos and it was an interesting experiment, especially for someone who has mainly recorded in stereo for the last 50 years.”
Tim Weidner adds, “PMC speakers have such fantastic clarity that they made our lives much easier when mixing this project in Atmos. The songs on this album are quite sonically complex, so the clarity that PMC delivers was extremely helpful in achieving great Atmos mixes.”
Seal signed to Trevor Horn’s Warner-distributed art-house label ZTT in 1990, soon after the success of “Killer,” the No. 1 single he recorded in collaboration with DJ/producer Adamski. Over the following months, Horn recruited a group of session musicians and the album was recorded in several different studios, including Sarm West in London’s Notting Hill. Following its release in May, 1991, it won Best British Album at the 1992 Brit Awards, while the track “Killer,” which was re-worked for the album, won Seal an Ivor Novello award for songwriting.
The Dolby Atmos version of Seal will be available soon through streaming services.
