Over the past month, Mackie products played a pivotal role in the release of three major holiday season blockbusters - The Matrix Revolutions, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and Gothika. The studios involved in the sound production of these major movies all used Mackie HR626 Active Studio Monitors in their post production work.

Danetracks Studios in Hollywood earlier this year equipped their studios with HR626 monitors for production of The Matrix Reloaded, and they have since become a permanent fixture - used on both The Matrix Revolutions and Gothika. These two films required vastly different sound treatments, but the HR626s provided both projects with the accurate monitoring necessary for clean, detailed sound effects.

"The Mackie HR626s and Mackie HRS150 subwoofer were central to my sound design work on Matrix Revolutions," commented Danetracks Sound Designer Eric Lindemann, who also did the sound for the first two Matrix movies. "They gave me an articulate non-hyped 5.1 sound field, which translated well to the dubbing theatre."

Lindemann also incorporated the new Mackie Control Universal control surface into his Pro Tools equipped studio. "Mackie's control surface gave me a tactile alternative to the track ball when layering sounds and setting overall levels while taking up little space," he said.

Rich Adrian, another Danetracks sound designer, focused his efforts on the new Halle Berry thriller Gothika. "The sound design on Gothika required everything from very delicate and subtle backgrounds to extremely intense sound moments," Adrian detailed. "With the HR626s, I was proud to work closely with the director in my room and know that the material accurately represented what would be heard on the dubbing stage."

Somewhere just across town, The Village Recorder Studios, located in West Los Angeles, completed work earlier this fall on the Russell Crowe sea epic Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Central to Australian Sound Designer Simon Leadley's studio were the Mackie HR626 monitors.

"There's always so much mystery about speakers, but it all comes down to your either liking them or not," commented Leadley, who's past sound production credits include Moulin Rouge, Hearts in Atlantis and Inspector Gadget 2. "The one thing I find remarkable about the Mackie family of studio monitors is that they're totally non-fatiguing. I used them on Moulin Rouge for up to 17 hours a day. If you're sitting in front of a set of speakers for that long, the last thing you want is a set of monitors that bark at you. And I can almost say unequivocally, anything we did sounded the same when we took it to the stage."

Leadley is equally impressed with the Active design of the Mackie Active Studio Monitors. "You can definitely hear the difference with an amp and speaker matched to each other. Particularly in Mackie's case, where they've got their own range of amps as well, they've been able to engineer them as a nicely coupled system. I mean, it's incredible that you've got like 150 Watts on the bottom end and another 100 Watts driving the tweeter, but the amp just literally goes right into a coil, so any capacitance is just due to whatever's in the coil. That makes it a lot easier to design the amp, and does a better job of making it sound good."