He Made a Promise, Then Doubled Down

Glendale, CA (July 26, 2024)—Starting out in the business 10 years ago, producer and mixer Robbie Soukiasyan promised himself he would one day get a pair of Amphion monitors—and now he has two pairs.

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. “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.”

It took a couple of years before he was finally able to fulfill that promise to himself. He initially interned at NightBird Recording Studios in W. Hollywood, CA, before becoming a full-time engineer, eventually meeting XXXTentacion there and leaving to work with him.

“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.

“I used the One12 Mobile Kit in the studio and in that studio that we built in the house,” he says. “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.”

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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,” he says. “Honestly, now I refuse to mix on anything else.”

Soukiasyan’s collaborations with XXXTentacion, who was killed in 2018, took him to stratospheric heights. The artist’s second studio album ,?, became XXXTentacion’s first U.S. number-one album, debuting in the top spot on the Billboard 200 in its first week of release. RIAA-certified Platinum five times over, it remains the most streamed hip-hop album on Spotify, with 1.6 billion streams as of April 2024.