“I don’t think you can put heritage to one side. It’s like saying Buckingham Palace is just a house,” says Giles Martin. The Grammy award-winning producer – once schooled by his father George, who knew a thing or two about a thing or two – is paying tribute to Abbey Road Studios, where he’s spent a huge amount of his life. Its power, he says, cannot be separated from its history.
“It’s a bit like a teapot – you’re not meant to clean them out properly. If you walk into a place and Dark Side of the Moon and Sgt Pepper’s were made there, there’s almost an expectation that you should be making a good record, doing a good mix. A quality level.”
Speaking to Martin, you realise that quality is in the detail. Much of what he hears, one guesses, may go unnoticed by the average human ear, but the subliminal effect, he says, is powerful. As Sound Experience Leader for Sonos, he is responsible for ensuring that what comes out of its speakers represents, as accurately as possible, what is captured by producers in studios.
“Sounding good is a very broad thing,” he explains. “The mid-range of a speaker, which is where the human voice is, and where cellos are – that’s almost where our soul connects to it.” But it turns out there is more to it than that. “We get excited by bass,” he says. It seems clear that, for Martin, the frequencies we respond to at the most primal level are lower down the spectrum.
“Bass is important because it gives us an emotional impact – that’s what’s so beautiful about it all. It’s about that emotional connection. Sonos has been very brave in letting me collaborate with them, because that’s what I bring to the table. There are really badly mixed records, like Fresh by Sly and the Family Stone, that sound great. The technical mix is all over the shop, but it hits you, and I think that’s what you have to discover as a producer.”
Martin’s wife won’t put up with him bringing studio speakers into his house. He reflects ruefully of growing up in an era of huge speakers and turntables, as opposed to today’s world of tinny bluetooth speakers and listening to music on phones or laptops. Yet even in days of yore, his father was similarly stifled at home.
“My dad was one of the most famous record producers of all time,” he says, “but he used to have to listen to mixes in the car because mum wouldn’t let him have speakers in the living room.”
Mercifully, Martin’s wife digs the Sonos speakers that fill their home, though, which suits them both as they produce beautiful sound while fitting neatly into their space. “The thing that attracts me to Sonos is that people don’t have to think about set up or do anything,” he says. “I would like people not to think about it. It’s great that people are tech-savvy these days, but I think you should be able to just buy a box and put it in your house.”
This goes for home cinema, too. Martin has recently been working on Playbase, Sonos’s new home cinema system, which “represents film mixes really well”. For expert advice, he talks to film mixers, and laughs at his own detective methods – last year he Googled “Who won the last Oscar for best sound mixing” and found it was Chris Jenkins, for Mad Max: Fury Road – who, coincidentally, was working with Martin on Ron Howard’s Beatles film Eight Days a Week. For help on the Playbase, Martin watched Fury Road with Jenkins, and asked him if it sounded like it was supposed to.
He’s also brought in composer Steven Price, who won an Oscar for his Gravity score, to help on the Playbase. Working in Abbey Road allows you to grab such people, as the place is teeming with film types. “There’s always people like that in the corridors, it’s like a real community spirit there,” says Martin. “Sonos has a partnership deal with Abbey Road, so I can grab an engineer or producer or film composer like Steven, get into a room and go: ‘Does it sound right?’”
Of course, a good system has to sound right, but the other question is: “Does it fit right?” This is also a key consideration for Martin. He recently visited a friend who had a couple of Sonos Play:1 surround speakers next to their Playbar (Playbase’s predecessor) instead of behind it, and wondered how he could suggest moving them “without sounding like a pretentious git”. The new Playbase will fit under your TV, which solves that problem.
Pretentious git or not, Martin is on a mission to bring value back to the listening experience. In a world where we can all stream whatever we want down the line, his job, he says, as both producer and in his work for Sonos, is to be “like a clear pane of glass” – to get the source sound into your home as clearly as it sounded when it was made. All he wants is for us to get so lost in the music that we forget all about the delivery system.
