Ed Thorne trusts in PSI Audio A23-M and commends their “most neutral, transparent sound”

Yverdon-les-Bains, 20th March 2024 – Ed Thorne is serious about sound, which his subscribers on YouTube appreciate. Not willing to compromise on his monitoring system, the London-based music producer tested a number of popular studio speakers and eventually picked his favourites: PSI Audio A23-M.

Ed Thorne: drummer, producer, YouTuber

For Ed Thorne, music really was his first love – more specifically, the drums. Starting to play at 11 years old, he broke into the professional music scene in London in his early twenties, regularly playing five gigs per week. He soon found himself taking care of the tech the bands needed, and consequently started his own full-time sound company. Over time, he gravitated more towards studio work, and eventually focussed on recording and mixing music. “And that is where YouTube came in,” Ed Thorne explains. “I wanted to document the process of writing, recording and producing an album, just to give people an idea of exactly what is involved in production.” Success was not immediate, as Thorne remembers: “I did a couple of videos documenting the first song that I fully recorded, engineered and mixed myself. No one cared. So I pivoted and did some educational content, like how EQs worked. Things I knew from my live days. Again, no one cared.” Then came the pandemic, and things changed. “I made a video comparing audio interfaces, and just so happened to release them in April 2020 when everyone was looking for content like that. The video took off and somewhat defined the YouTube channel.”

Extensive shoot-outs to find the perfect speakers

Like with his content, Ed Thorne also tried different monitoring systems. “It was an interesting journey because I really had to figure out what was going to work for me,” he says. His studio room in Western London is quite small, which always poses a challenge in terms of acoustics. So he tried very different speakers: the popular ones, the obvious ones, some more exotic ones. After time-consuming and elaborate listening tests, Ed Thorne had collected a lot more experience with speakers. And he had formed an opinion that governed his choice the Swiss-precision three-way speakers A23-M by PSI Audio.

Analogue precision and natural depth

One major reason for Ed Thorne to pick PSI Audio over all other brands is the all-analogue approach. “I tried a lot of speakers,” he explains, “and some were really good, but they used DSPs and I felt like I could hear when the DSP was interfering and correcting. Almost as if they were trying to trick my ears. With PSI Audio, I immediately recognized that they are 100 percent analogue. They sound so natural. They’re the most neutral, transparent speakers I could find.” When asked to elaborate on the analogue sound, Thorne replies: “The most spacious top and the deepest depth. It’s like with preamps. Preamp modelling can sound quite good, but it is relatively flat, it lacks depth and richness. There is a three-dimensionality with analogue gear. That was something I heard with the PSI Audio speakers – others could come close, but something just doesn’t feel right with them. It does with PSI Audio.”

PSI Audio takes the guesswork out of mixing

Professionals need to be able to rely on the sound image they are presented by their speaker systems, and Ed Thorne stresses this fact with an anecdote. “I like running my guitars through a Wes Audio Rhea for its THD circuit. It creates some tube harmonics and saturation with the THD on medium at one percent and on high at 2.5 percent. On my previous speakers, I would notice the 2.5 percent when I would switch it on and off. On the PSI Audio speakers, even at only one percent, I was like: Oh! We will have to be careful with that!” Before, Thorne needed to double-check his mixes on different systems, even on his phone. With his PSI Audio A23-M, he always gets an accurate representation of the audio he is working on. “Things like overcompression are glaringly obvious,” he says. “The PSI Audio speakers are a joy to work on.”

Products and more information

Ed Thorne uses PSI Audio A23-M all-analogue three-way studio monitors. He can be found online at www.edthorne.com.

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