It has been 10 years since producer and mixer Robbie Soukiasyan, just starting out in the music business, first heard Amphion studio monitors and vowed that he would one day buy a pair. A decade later, now the proud owner of two pairs of the Finnish manufacturer’s loudspeakers and with chart-topping projects to his name, he says, “Honestly, now I refuse to mix on anything else.”
Soukiasyan’s first chance to hear Amphion speakers in action was when company founder Anssi Hyvönen gave him a demonstration at a trade show, hardly an ideal listening environment. “But even at an AES show, where it's super loud and there's so much going on, I was absolutely blown away by how crazy good they sounded, the immediacy, and the intimacy and how well you connected,” Soukiasyan recalls. “At the time, I couldn't afford them — not even close. But I knew at that moment, one day, when I have enough money, I'm getting myself some Amphions!”
Getting Some Amphions
It took a couple of years before he was finally able to fulfill that promise to himself. “I was working with an artist named XXXTentacion, and his producer, John Cunningham, and I were setting up a studio in the living room of a house in L.A. I went to the NAMM Show and met Julian Hyvönen, Amphion’s marketing manager. He’s a big fan of X [XXXTentacion], so we hit it off. After talking to him, I picked up the Amphion One12 Mobile Kit.” The kit comprises a custom carrying case containing a pair of Amphion One12 monitors, a pair of Amphion amps designed specifically for the One12s and a set of Amphion cables.
Soukiasyan started out on his career path as an intern at NightBird Recording Studios in West Hollywood, California, a multi-room facility built below the Sunset Marquis Hotel that caters to a high-end clientele. He advanced from intern to assistant then engineer at the studio, where he first met and worked with XXXTentacion, eventually leaving NightBird to work full-time with the rapper and singer-songwriter. In addition to engineering and mixing, he went on to also produce several tracks with XXXTentacion, who was killed in 2018.
“I used the One12 Mobile Kit in the studio and in that studio that we built in the house,” Soukiasyan continues. “I mixed a lot of stuff and I did a lot of tracking on the One12s. They sound amazing. John [Cunningham] fell in love with them, too, and ended up getting a pair of Two18s after we moved out of that house.”
New Studio, More Monitors
Setting up a studio in the next house that he moved into, Soukiasyan reports, “At that point, I wanted to get either the Amphion Two18s or the One18s. I ended up getting the One18s. Julian and Anssi brought them over to my studio and set them up. It was supposed to be a demo, but as soon as I pressed play, I said, ‘You guys aren't taking these back. I’m keeping these!’ To this day, I've still I got those One18s in my studio.”
Because of the nature of the music production process these days, where artists will often move from one studio to another or work in hotels or on the tour bus, “I never got rid of the One12s, just because I love being able to take them anywhere,” he continues. “We go to a lot of different studios, including other people's home studios or production rooms. A lot of times you go somewhere that’s not acoustically treated well. But those One12s are perfect, because they sound good in untreated rooms — and treated rooms — because of their size. So, I take those with me all the time and the One18s always stay in my studio.”
Soukiasyan’s collaborations with XXXTentacion took him to stratospheric heights. The artist’s second studio album ,?, released in March 2018, became XXXTentacion's first U.S. number-one album, debuting in the top spot on the Billboard 200 in its first week of release. The album, which has been RIAA-certified Platinum five times over, remains the most streamed hip-hop album on Spotify, with 1.6 billion streams as of April 2024. Lead single "Sad!" topped the Billboard Hot 100, with XXXTentacion becoming the first lead artist to earn a posthumous number-one on the chart since Notorious B.I.G. in 1997.
Other projects Soukiasyan mixed on his One18s include the BTS remix of “Savage Love (Laxed – Siren Beat)” by Jason Derulo and Jawsh 685. “That was number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and is now at over a billion plays — and mixed on Amphion,” he says. More recently, he mixed the current album by Lil Tjay, titled 222.
“We did that on my One18s, and I also took my One12s with me to Jamaica, where we set up in a really nice house out there,” he says. He also mixed XXXTentacion’s third album, Skins, and fourth album, Bad Vibes Forever, both released after the artist’s death, on his Amphion One18s. “I also produced a song for an artist named $not and mixed some songs by Aries as well as several songs for the video game Gran Turismo 7 on my One18s,” he adds.
Looking back, saving up to buy his first pair of Amphion studio monitors was one of the best decisions he’s made, Soukiasyan says. “People ask me, what's one of the best investments I've made in my studio? It's the Amphions, because they have paid for themselves so many times over now.”
For more on Robbie Soukiasyan please visit, https://robbiesoukiasyan.com/
For more information about Amphion, please visit: https://amphion.fi/
