Ep.11 - Immersive Audio and the Next Format Shift in Music Production ft. George Williams

Immersive audio isn’t just another format—it may be the most significant shift in music production since the move from mono to stereo.

In this episode, George from Apogee Electronics joins us to explore how immersive audio is reshaping the way music is created, mixed, and experienced. From the early days of digital recording to today’s rapid adoption of Dolby Atmos, we unpack the technical, creative, and commercial forces driving this evolution.

The conversation dives into the realities behind immersive workflows, the role of major platforms like Apple in accelerating adoption, and why this format is finally succeeding where surround sound struggled.

For integrators, engineers, and anyone working in pro AV, this episode offers a grounded look at what immersive audio actually means—and where it’s going next.

Transcript

Opening Banter And Stereo Skepticism

SPEAKER_04 0:01

Because Vince it's not sold on it. We have that conversation about a week ago.

SPEAKER_03 0:05

It's not that I'm not sold, it's just uh I guess I'm an old school two-channel stereo and audiophile guy.

SPEAKER_05 0:12

I don't know much about immersive and Obi, so if I come off as the uh the noob in in this conversation, don't don't get offended.

SPEAKER_04 0:20

Anyways, out of eleven podcasts, there was only one where it didn't sound like a noob. Only one. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 0:28

This might be the second.

SPEAKER_03 0:29

I think I think just with dot three today, we've covered a wide uh range of audiences we have. We have to have.

SPEAKER_04 0:38

We always try uh we always start with me uh catching uh a virtual uh uh fly. So so we start always with a clap like this. Yep.

SPEAKER_03 0:55

Hopefully one day he'll catch it, George. Hopefully. Well, George, thank you for uh jumping on to uh behind the rack. Um I'm a huge fan of immersive audio on the cinema side. So uh I'm really excited to have you and kind of talk about um I think we all are. I mean we've we've had discussions off camera for a long time, and um I think you're the perfect person to kind of enlighten us in terms of how immersive is is coming into the audio space in terms of um sorry, more into the music space. Um and I and I know it's happening. I mean, we we we spent a little bit of time on iTunes and he was kind of giving me a rundown, but um before we get into that, how about um you give us a little bit of a um a lowdown in terms of your background and and apogee and all that stuff?

George’s Path Into Apogee

SPEAKER_02 2:06

Sure, yeah. Thank you guys for having me on. I really do appreciate it. And yeah, immersive audio is this incredibly interesting topic. I mean, at the very minimum, this is something that is a really wild discussion to have amongst people, right? We have not seen a format shift since Mana went to stereo back in like the 60s and Phil Spectre era, and you know, that is such a wild thing to think that we are now in a course of adjustment where people are looking to go into multi-speaker systems and not just as an experiment, but thinking as an actual creative tool. So, yeah, I'm I'm really happy to talk about this topic because I think it is going to be the way we are listening to music down the road. And wherever you think we are with the state of that process, I still think that that endpoint is pretty easy to perceive as being the end outcome of it. And at Apogee, luckily, the cool thing is we've been really, really tight with that whole process. And I joined the company um coming from a perspective of being a bedroom producer. I was playing in metal and hardcore bands, and I ended up uh buying my first duet because the guy who was training me to get certified in logic at the time had just graduated from Berkeley College of Music. And I think I was like looking at a presonas interface, and he's like, George, I'm not coming out to your metal shows because you suck. Like, buy something that can actually represent your effort you put into your guitar, right? And uh funny enough, about six months after that, where I got certified in Logic and then got my duet, I ended up getting hired for I think the first gig I did was like a Bossa Nova jazz band. And so I'd never used as much of my music theory background as communicating with the guitarist of that band and talking about different inversions and voicings of stuff. So yeah, it was cool. That was my introduction to Apogee as a product, which was 2010, and it really like made it so that my productions were possible to sound like what I wanted to sound like, because I didn't realize the extent to which my mic collection meant nothing if I didn't have a decent mic preamp and converter to go through. And then uh lucky for me, after teaching Logic for Apple for a number of years, I ended up doing a couple events with Apogee. Um, one that was for the Grammy Committee of uh Seattle back when I was living up there, uh, when the ensemble Thunderbolt came out. And so I met some of the team then. And then after I moved down to LA, uh I actually ended up doing an event called Creative Studios out here, and it was during the kind of COVID shutdown thing where we were teaching a lot of people remotely how to do uh production based on iPads, and that is when I met uh Cody, who was the guy who I took over for. So I started as a sales engineer position, moved into key accounts management, and then moved into project evangelism, and then now I'm currently product marketing manager here. Very cool.

SPEAKER_04 4:48

That's and maybe uh because I was talking with the guys before, uh, Apogee has a very rich history of uh recording music. Uh without going into too much details, would you mind talking a little bit about uh the beginning of Apogee, maybe who they are associated with at the beginning and just a little bit about this?

SPEAKER_02 5:09

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the interesting things about Apogee, when you come and check out the actual headquarters and studio, is realizing that like for this company that's had a truly monumental impact generally on music production and the habits and kind of culture of engineering generally, it's a pretty darn small company. And you know, when I got into music production, it was already after we had moved into DAW-based digital production. I mean, I'm a child that like, you know, my first productions were either going to be on a computer or on like these terrible type two cassette track recorders, which were the options available in my price range at the time. And then to 2000s, we were kind of after the fact that they realized you could do uh really competent digital music. But it's weird talking to someone like Betty who had founded the company, came from Soundcraft and Live Mixing. And I remember being shocked one of the first times she told me that when she was trying to sell the first product that modified these Sony PCM uh digital tape machines, people looked at it like it was the worst possible scenario for their reputation. And that's so wild to me as someone that grew up with the idea of digital music being a creative tool, right? But to many engineers at the time, 1985, you know, the CD-ROM format existed since '83. 86 is when we put out that first product, and all of a sudden, you start to see a ton of people that were willing to deliver to digital. And very much because of that first product, this 944 filter that dealt with anti-aliasing problems that were prevalent on that machine. It made it so that this brick wall limiter wasn't creating those problems. And basically, you had to brick a, you know, by today's money, million-dollar plus machine in order to make it usable. And this is kind of how the CD-ROM revolution started taking off. And then very shortly after you had UV22, which is still built into logic to this day as its main way of encoding CDs. But that technology, when it came out, was a huge difference in how people dealt with Dith Ring between 24 to 16-bit. And man, it really created a whole revolution of people that were willing to deliver to digital at very minimum. And then it's wild to think that in the 2000s that kind of happened again, like late 90s, 2000s, when you started to see Pro Tools edit go down to a single, you know, commercially available license that could run on commercial TDN style computers. All of a sudden, you started seeing a ton of people that were not only delivering to digital, but were willing to track in it as well, which obviously has enormous repercussions as to the creative process. I mean, it's kind of impossible to think about a world that doesn't involve some amount of guitar editing and DI work these days, and all these digital tools were making that stuff accessible. So it's really wild to think about the total impact of the company, which really has had the same mission for years and years and years. It's just taking different formats, whether it'd been the first move to digital tape machines or PC-based digital editing platforms in the 2000s or later on, things like the duet that took that kind of studio quality and put it into bedroom production environments. And now I think the big shift is obviously a lot of people that are working in stereo starting to say, oh, what is immersive audio about? What does it offer as creative opportunities? Why would I actually care to do it? And the cool thing is is we've made a lot of that process a lot simpler for the people that care to get into it.

SPEAKER_04 8:33

Very cool. That's a very good he couldn't. I mean, he's working for Apogee, so I couldn't sum it up better than him. Yeah, that's that's the perfect, it's exactly the answer I was looking for.

SPEAKER_05 8:44

And I think, you know, I think Apogee is one of those brands where even if you're not uh fully invested in production, I'll use myself as an example. You know, I come from the DJ world, uh a bit of audio, a bit of video, and uh, you know who Apogee is and what they do. Um and it's funny, uh, when we talk to to other suppliers, I often give anecdotes of visiting their offices or or meeting people at that company. And apogee was one of those places where uh I was lucky to to visit the the studios and their their offices. It was about two, three years ago uh during NAM. And you walk into that place, whether it be the studio or the offices, and you're just like, okay, this is this is legendary. There's really important people that have walked through this space or have worked there, who've recorded there, um, and you can tell everybody there has such a passion uh for representing that that company. So I just want to put that out there because I think a lot of people, you know, there's there's so many brands out in this world, but apogee is one of those where when you're talking about interfaces, you kind of get that wow, okay, yeah, I know who these guys are and what they do. And that's important in this type of market today. So uh kudos to everybody at apogee because it's such a such an amazing environment to be in. And like I said, even someone who's who's not fully invested in production or doesn't have a lot of knowledge about immersive, and I think that's where we're gonna go now is you got to sell me on immersive, right? Tell me why immersive is better than stereo, but you just know of the brand because of the legacy and because of the people involved with it. So I just wanted to mention that.

SPEAKER_02 10:20

Yeah, we love that that community aspect of it comes across because that's definitely one of the unique things about working here is that you know, we do shows with KCRW. You know, you're literally rubbing elbows with Bob Claremountain a lot of the times in headquarters here. Um, you know, one of the weird things that has happened with a lot of people that learn about apogee is they may not be a part of the music world, they might be a part of post-production or they may just be fans of music, and they end up learning about our company because of some of the involvement that we have with trying to stay really, really close and connected with this community that we have that's available to us from living in Los Angeles and Santa Monica and having a studio that has a live performance space. And you know, one of the things I've I've come to realize is very unique about Apogee is that it is a music and musician and engineer forward company. And oftentimes when you look at larger corporations and groups, very commonly the decision makers are not necessarily connected with the realities of users. And, you know, one of the things I've tried to do as much as I can in my tenure here at Apogee is really lobby for the users, you know, as someone that really would not have been able to make my art without some of the tools that became available in digital home recording spaces. You know, I see it as a uh obligation to pay it forward. And the cool thing about the whole company is that music as a foundation and just loving sound has really been the foundation of the company as long as it's existed.

SPEAKER_05 11:45

And you see it and you feel it when you go there. And obviously when you're just the background of his yeah, like it's like that everywhere. It's amazing. I I mean I was uh I was sitting right behind Bob Clearmount, and he was mixing uh they had a live show and it was uh it was during NAM, so it's I think they they do it every year or every couple years. Yeah. And like just being behind Bob while he's mixing, and you're just like, okay, this is someone really important. This is crazy right now. You know, like it's it's just it's got a really cool aura and legacy to the brand, and uh it's important. Like I said, it's it's great for brand loyalty and and for users, and and I think everyone that opens up you know their first apogee product, you feel like you're part of the family and you're part of the legacy that they're building. So it's uh it's important, and not a lot of brands could do that.

SPEAKER_03 12:29

Yeah. And if and if and that brings me back to if apogee is getting into immersive audio, then it must mean something. It must mean something. It must mean something.

SPEAKER_02 12:39

Well, funny enough, you know, and by the way, I had a similar experience with the uh kind of uh reaction to meeting Bob. So one of the ways that Betty closed the deal with me is she showed up randomly another place that she knew I would be, and she's like, Hey, this is legendary mixing engineer Bob Clearpoint, and I just like and my eyes widen, was like, you know, completely blindsided by it. And you know, I think one of the funny things is like you meet your heroes sometimes, and like sometimes that is like a bit of a letdown. Uh Bob could not be further from that. You know, he is really truly one of the guys you could be talking politics at the main uh kitchen nook table, and he is just the most regular guy and just cares more about music and thinks he's genuinely interested than anything related to fame or acclaim or things and stuff. And I think that that's such a cool perspective that he's so grounded and so willing to share his knowledge with everyone. I mean, especially with some of the seminars I've gotten to do with him. I've gotten to facilitate all kinds of cool conversations between him and music students, and the guy is willing to give any information he has. And what's funny is his perspective on it is as if he's not an expert at all, which is wild considering his position.

SPEAKER_04 13:49

I didn't know that uh Betty would use uh Bob as a secret weapon to close deals, so that that's good to be.

From Quad To Dolby Atmos

SPEAKER_02 13:54

I mean, you know, here's the thing there's a reason why digital audio is everywhere right now, and you have Betty Bennett to thank for a lot of that. She's willed a lot of stuff into existence. And uh yeah, funny enough, actually, the immersive audio thing was actually another one of her ideas because Bob had gotten exposed to doing surround sound mixing. Um, back when that was a you know, a technology. I'm not gonna say that it was like a common format, because to be honest with you, that's my main problem with surround sound is the technology as compared to Atmos, is that you had the ability of doing it, but you had poor implementation. I mean, I remember taking at the University of Washington a DX Arts class where we learned all about doing quad-based sound art. And, you know, quadriphonic is one of the first attempts at doing immersive audio, and it happened decades and decades ago, you know. So people have been thinking about this idea of trying to escape two cones of speakers being the way main way of being able to represent all kinds of instruments that are crammed into it for a long time. But quadriphonic really failed because it was such a complex setup that to do it, you really need to have some people that are able to control the environment to really high extents. And it was not possible for a lot of people that bought into hi-fi equipment to have a reasonably good experience with playing quadriphonic sound. And so when you think of around sound coming out after that, certainly you had something that was more standardized, and you started to see a lot of consumer devices that would, you know, quote unquote support the format. But then did you have a CD deck that would deliver it to the right way? And you know, there were all kinds of compatibility problems with it. And what's funny is that when Atmos really came out into music, which I would dare say the big push happened somewhere between 2018 and 2020, that's really when Betty was like, hey, Bob, you've been doing Surround already. There's this thing Atmos, you really should be paying attention to it. And at the time, I don't know if he was actually all that convinced that it was wildly different from Surround, but you know, come a couple years later, and it's a pretty wildly different scenario where many of the problems that were experienced with Quad and Surround in terms of adoption and you know, format problems and things not working together. You know, one thing you can say about Atmos, despite any other, you know, concern you have about it, it is ubiquitous. I mean, it has become accessible in all kinds of different ways very, very quickly as a format, which is wildly different than some of the other attempts at immersive previously.

What Immersive Audio Actually Is

SPEAKER_05 16:19

So, George, we have uh a ton of different listeners with of various amounts of of knowledge. Uh very quickly, what is immersive audio and why is it so important?

SPEAKER_02 16:30

Yeah, so good question. So I would dare say immersive audio is anything that tries to envelop the listener more. And we usually, when we're talking immersive audio, we are talking about multi-speaker setups, but it could also be defined as formats that affect your headphones. It could be a technology that encodes audiophiles. Um, to most of us, what immersive audio really means is we're trying to create a 3D dome of sound around the listener in some meaningful way. And again, people have been trying this since quadriphonic sound. Atmos is a specific version of this that's come out back when Brave was first debuted, was the first time it happened in post-production, was for that particular movie. At the time, I think you had 26 theaters that were able to play it at the time of that launch around the whole world. And now you have quite literally millions of devices that are all capable of doing Atmos playback. So pretty wild to think about the change and progression of it. But really, what we're talking about is the ability of not having to be limited to two speakers. You know, mono went to stereo. That really allowed you to deal with panning information that influenced a bunch of great records. I mean, think about like, you know, Dark Side of the Moon from Pink Floyd, right? You couldn't have that record work the same way if you didn't have stereo. But, you know, there's also a similar thing that's happening right now in immersive where a really great immersive record is able to give you tingles and a sensation out of the same tracks that would not be accomplished through a two-speaker system. And so, in a lot of ways, for people that are doing mixing on it and music production in particular, the cool thing is it's kind of freeing because a lot of the things that you're struggling with as a mixer are oftentimes figuring out how to EQ and compress and make it so that all these things that want to fight within two speakers are able to coexist in a meaningful way. You move into immersive audio, all of a sudden you have a lot more different ways of problem solving and doing creative mapping of this same stuff. And I think that that is definitely the creative uh the creative inspiration behind a lot of people that really get into the process of doing this kind of work.

SPEAKER_04 18:34

So the soundscape is much bigger, which brings less how can I put it less mix less mixing limitation and challenges uh uh because you have more space, literally more virtual space or more acoustic space, or more let's call it, yeah, more more audio space to play with. So that's very interesting.

SPEAKER_02 18:56

Yeah, I think that's one of the things that people wouldn't expect going into it. Is it's like, well, in some ways the problem solving becomes easier because there's less stuff it has to inherently fight. If you want to, you can throw the reverb to your rear speakers. If you want, you can absolutely have it so that things go to your top speakers, right? There's all kinds of interesting ways of dealing with panning when you would otherwise exhaust your faders, right?

Three Types Of Immersive Mixes

SPEAKER_04 19:19

So finally we can finally get more callbell. Sorry, it wasn't too easy. Uh I was speaking with Vince just before the podcast. Um I don't know if you're you agree with me, but I uh in in all these different scenarios, I hear uh three different uh type of uh immersive mixes. Uh and I can hear clearly the difference whether it's in IN headphones like the Apple uh AirPod Max, which sound very good uh it's a good compromise if you don't have uh speakers in the ceiling or but um I hear a difference between uh stereo track that has been upmixed with plugins. I also hear a difference with a stereo mix that has been remixed. So basically they go back to the original tracks, whether they're analog or digital, and they remix the whole project into Del Diatmos. And the next step, like what I call the pinnacle of the uh of the immersive music, is when uh uh uh artists like Billy Eilish or name it and any every art every top artist these days are are are recording in Delby Atmos. So when the intention, when the creation is with immersive in in mind, it sounds literally different than the two other before that. Um do you agree with me on this?

SPEAKER_02 20:43

Yeah, actually, this is funny because this is a topic that's commonly brought up on these Atmos field trips with students is like when will we know that Atmos has arrived? And one of the answers that commonly is kind of agreed upon when you propose it with students is when artists are using it as a part of the conception process of their song. When it becomes a creative tool that is as essential to understanding it as something like panning is within stereo. And I think we're starting to hit that point where, you know, uh one of the tracks I commonly show is uh I Feel Alive by this artist Jane. And it's incredible because this track basically deals with mostly a mono singer-songwriter kind of focus, and then all of a sudden, with the chorus, the main line comes in, I feel alive, and it's everywhere. It goes from something that's extremely narrow to like really wildly immersive, and quite literally, it's a mixing decision that influences the feeling of the song's message being conveyed. And I think that's one of the really cool things is that people that are getting into immersive audio are going to be defining the format. And I think that's one of the reasons why students really take to it after they've heard it for the first time is it's like, oh, this is not only something that is really cool and really fun to work with, but you Will actually be able to define to a large extent what this format becomes and how it's used creatively.

SPEAKER_03 22:06

So is it do you do you think, George, it's the demand is coming a lot from the engineers, the artists, or the audience?

SPEAKER_02 22:15

You know, uh, I don't mean to be a pessimist, but like I don't believe necessarily any of those players have enough pull to make this happen. I think it's happening from totally other places, which I think is based upon actually, in many ways, companies like Apple that have decided this is what they're deciding to put all their risk and bet behind. I mean, I think for music mixing, especially, the big shift that happened was music mixing coming into Apple Music and becoming a you know driver of selection for playlists. And at that time, it also made sense that it was in coordination with them launching Vision Pro and some of these other products that also require 8K style video, that require immersive audio as kind of caveats to all the content that's being made for them. And you know, you can look at that product as being something that likely is going to be years out of when it will become popular culture or really be in a final form that's as abundant as something like the iPhone is, right? But the nature of it is that oftentimes the things that are going to drive format shifts are things that are tied to companies that have the amount of weight to make those things move. And so I think, you know, if you look at uh some of the cinema companies that are behind it and the various uh things that are related to uh production on movies, I think that's one of the things that really drove it for years. And I think that now you're starting to see that for a lot of the streaming services and a lot of the companies that are supporting music streaming, they've actually been real big instigators in trying to get back catalogs updated. I think that the record labels realized that they were, you know, was money and residuals to be had in this new format that they wanted to explore. And certainly that was a big part of the push of the back catalog kind of era of Atmos production. And now I think you're starting to see it as well, it's finally getting enough popular exposure and enough uh, to be fair, I think it also took tracks that were good enough that were really truly a different experience in Atmos to get artists behind it. And I think that that's kind of actually a higher barrier in some ways because I think with you know, something like post-production, the idea of a helicopter flying over you in a movie, it's a concept they've had for years. And so it makes plenty of sense that to be able to pinpoint that more locally is like a huge advantage. But for a musician, like you know, I'm not necessarily caring when I'm shredding whether the guitar solo is flying around the room, it's just not a common thing to do in stereo either, right? But when you do start to feel that there is a creative advantage of how things are placed or the ability of making people feel things, man, all of a sudden it becomes way easier to get people to buy into it from that aspect.

SPEAKER_03 24:55

Yeah. I I think um where where I'm coming from is um I I've always been um a big proponent of surround or yeah, we'll start with surround sound. It's called it means a channel, yeah, multi-channel, but you know that that even going back to what Odysseo was doing before uh um Dolby and DTS were doing. And um nowadays I'm finding, and I've had this conversation with both Franco and Hugo, it's like now a lot of people are moving away from home theater setups or you know, surround sounds and now Adolby at most setups and going more for sound bars and stuff like that. Now while in a movie scenario, when you're watching a movie at home, for instance, you're sitting down and you're you're watching, and I would argue today that has changed and that has evolved now. Like a lot of the younger crowd are watching movies on their phones or a laptop. So I get that it's a little bit more mobile, but most commonly you're sitting down and at home, however, like when it comes to music, usually a lot of people today are not I I think maybe they are listening to it a little bit more actively because vinyl's coming back, so you're slowly prone. Yeah, you're you're more prone to sitting down and actually listening to something. But I think because of the technology shifting to being more compact, people, you know, I don't want to get into politics, but you know, a lot of people are going into condos versus houses, there's a lot less room to to create a space. I think that's where I was coming from in terms of um film is one thing, but music in the immersive space, I'm like I'm seeing a lot less of a decline in even just in the home theater aspect. I'm wondering how much it's I'm seeing it even less in in the in the in the music in the music space. Minus, you know, if you're looking at headphones and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't know what your take is on.

SPEAKER_02 26:50

Yeah, it's an interesting question because I kind of I kind of agree with you on the basic premise, right? Like my my father got me into music, I think, in the way that I became a producer, right? He was a enormous Beach Boys fan, had a hi-fi system back in the 70s. Literally, my my childhood was listening to the session tapes, not the final record of Pet Sounds. Wow. So quite literally all the components being individually recorded and him screaming different things at the orchestra and you know, having Carol be okay, but every other member member of the band needing to do something else different.

SPEAKER_01 27:23

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 27:23

So um one of the weird things you think about when you think about people that were listening in the 70s, especially, is that music was a very intentional process. And I think that vinyl definitely lended itself to that, where people sat down in a room, they listened to a record. It wasn't the idea of, oh, let's just set a vibe and that's it, right? There was this very intentional idea of new record count came out, here's quadruphenia, here's whatever this is, let's experience it. And the music was a draw the same way that watching a movie was an event, right? And so one of the things that I would dare say is probably a negative about modern culture and the miniaturization accessibility of access of music is that it definitely cheapened that experience to some extent, where people are less intentional about it. Maybe they listen to playlists as opposed to following bands. You know, there's all kinds of cultural differences around it. But um, one of the weird things about immersive is that in many ways it kind of does bring back that hi-fi culture thing because people are more intentional about it. And the cool thing is that from a barrier of entry standpoint, you know, I would dare say as much as people do use phones and tablets to watch content, probably the majority of people are still watching through something like a PlayStation 5, through a television screen. And in those kind of scenarios, you know, these Atmos equipped soundbars are like dead easy things you hook up to that are no more difficult to use than stereo and still provide an additional level of spatialization that, especially for movie watching, yeah, no doubt it is much better approximating the experience of what it's like in a cinema.

Real 7.1.4 Versus Headphones

SPEAKER_04 29:04

Yeah, so it makes sense. That brings me to a question. I mean, uh don't be shy, but what is your listening system at home? Do you are you listening to a bar or you do you have a full-blown Atmos system? And again, if you don't want to say that's fine, but uh I'm curious.

SPEAKER_02 29:20

No, it's fine. I have uh a couple things that are able to support both formats. So I have uh my main PlayStation 5 and television that are going through some conto bookshelf speakers that are running just straight stereo, those are excellent for that purpose. Um, I have an Atmos equipped soundbar that works on another television in the same house, and then I have my kind of main primary studio listening setup, which is a set of uh Adams A7Xs that are running from an Apogee Symphony desktop, and that's kind of my main you know monitoring scenario at home. But realistically, the Atmos side of things, there's all kinds of different devices that support it that are all different levels, in my opinion. So, you know, I have a set of AirPod Pros. Um, I've have a number of different sets of high-end headphones that can run binaural and render to it. You know, my particular perspective on Atmos is a little bit guided also by the fact that I get to do activations and teach the format. So I oftentimes have done these seminars using Apogee Symphony Mark IIs and Genilec speakers. And that particular system, especially running something like GLM, man, it uh it becomes a bit life ruining for listening to things in a lot of other different setups. So that's why it always no doubt about it. I think the first time you hear a full 7.1.4 speaker system with a really transient, sensitive interface like ours and you know, proper speakers like the Genilex, man, it becomes very difficult to go back to stereo and not understand exactly what you're missing out on. And uh, you know, it helps to have killer content made by like Bob Clairmountain and Alan Myerson and some of these people that have gotten to show their workflow and kind of show what the potential of the format is, but there's no doubt in my mind that it also has to be declared that 7.1.4 as a playback format is the thing that gives you the tingles. And I would dare say the way it sounds in my AirPod Pros is not the same experience. Uh you know, it's still the same format, it still creates something that is noticeably different by the listener. But in my opinion, it also is one of the things that will change the most over the next 10, 20 years, is I think you'll find a lot of people where once they can actually hear a 7.1.4 playback system, whether it be built into their car, whether it be through some of these newer speaker systems that are coming out that network together, do the calibration automatically based upon the listening space. I think as the consumer products are really focused on putting speakers as opposed to just spatializing existing audio through two channels or through virtualization, those to me still feel really, really, really different.

SPEAKER_05 32:00

He's absolutely right because after I heard our demo of the 7.1.4 system with the you know the GLM and Genelec, it was unbelievable. And and to your point, uh George, uh I mean I understood immersive before that, but until you really hear it and you're in that situation and you get the tingles, as you put it, yeah, it's true. It's it's completely it's mind-blowing. Like it's a different uh spatial experience completely. Um so I I think personally, like even from a from a branding or business point of view, I think immersive, uh, I personally think this is my opinion. I I think it's still in a phase where um uh yes, there's a lot more companies that are adapting it, it's becoming more accessible to the end users, but I still think that there needs to be a push for people to even learn about it, you know. Like we're getting to a point now where yes, all the major manufacturers are starting to to include them. Like you said, whether it be, you know, a car sound system or a sound bar that is Adobe uh compatible or at most compatible, uh it's all about telling people, hey, you have you ever tried immersive? Some people don't even know, you know, and and I think it's just a matter of making them aware that there is something even better out there, and you you don't necessarily need a 7.1.4 system to be able to enjoy the benefits of it, just like anything else, there's different levels. But yeah, I I think it's just a matter of educating people of saying, hey, you you know, that album says immersive, some people will just skip over it or or not less listen to it or not even know what it means. But the way you explained it, by having more of that that soundscape of that that that space, that 3D environment for sound, um, I I think it opens up a lot of people's eyes to what's coming in the future. And I think we're just gonna start seeing it more and more. And uh, I'm excited for that because people need to experience that. And uh yeah, we need to get more 7.1.4 systems out there and give people more tingles because it's it's amazing. It's it's truly incredible.

SPEAKER_02 34:03

Yeah. I mean, if you're into music listening, that's what you're there for, right? You're there for something that feels like it changes your life's course, right? I think a lot of people, one of the ways they connect with music if they're real serious about it, right, is it becomes a part of their intrinsic identity. And that oftentimes requires really intense experiences. Like I will always say that I think going to concerts is one of these things that is just so overwhelming and so amazing. And, you know, obviously there's aspects where it's like if you're stage diving, like that's a very intense experience for various reasons. But I think there's also an aspect of the community of it, and I also think there's something about being uh moved in a way that's not pinpointed to just two speakers in a way. I think that there's definitely something different about being close to a stage and being able to move around to hear your guitar amplifier, hear the drums depending on where you decide to stand, safe side. Those kind of things we've always considered to be represented relatively favorably in stereo. But the second you hear a 7.1.4 experience and you hear the same record, and all of a sudden you can hear, oh, there's a 12-string guitar layered into this, and I never noticed it until now. It really does question how good it is to approximate the way that we hear music just because we have two ears, you know, like that's not necessarily how we perceive audio, it's definitely a mechanism towards it that we think that we are replicating through our playback system, but is likely quite a bit more complex.

SPEAKER_04 35:30

True. True. The the brain is percepting where the sounds are coming from. So the more speaker you have, the more position you can have sounds around your head, the more uh interesting becomes the experience, in my opinion. Um, so yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:45

Yeah, and it's also like one of the challenges of headphone-based renders of this kind of format as well, because transparently binaural is actually a pretty cool way of getting into it if you don't have any kind of specialized playback system. And there's a couple things people probably need to know if they're going to go about headphone mixing. Uh, one of those is that, you know, even something like AirPods Pro is a different playback format altogether than binaural. So it's good to know that part of it. But the other thing is that like there's psychoacoustic stuff going on to represent hype information in headphones that may not actually make you completely suspend your disbelief. And that's something that's being worked on. And if you've ever had uh someone do like an HTRF scan before to try to virtualize things better, or Sony's VME system, yeah, like there's definitely better ways of making headphone type playback systems trick our brains into psychoacoustically uh perceiving where things are placed in a way that is way better able to get past your suspension of disbelief.

SPEAKER_03 36:45

Would you say that's that's that would be your recommendation for anybody who's listening and hasn't heard any immersive or hasn't gone into the immersive experience to to start with, let's say uh a a pair of binaral uh uh headphones? Was that is that your entry point, or what would you recommend as a good entry point for somebody to to hear uh experience from the how do you sell them on immersive?

SPEAKER_05 37:12

This is the easiest way and the most affordable way.

Atmos Workflow And Stereo Deliverables

SPEAKER_04 37:14

Let's say I I don't have any immersive uh I'm I'm listening to everything stereo. I have AirPods. I don't even know that my AirPods Pro are doing like spatial audio. Yeah. So what's the for someone who doesn't know what's what's the what's the the entry point? Like I I think earlier you mentioned yeah, there's nothing like having a real discrete system with speakers, but what's the yeah, what's the selling point?

SPEAKER_02 37:42

Yeah, I mean, I'll be the first one to tell you. I am a fan of people getting the ability of expressing their art fully. So I'm a strange person to ask about selling something because yeah, I want us to sell our products, but I I sell our products because they match what people can make their best art with. That's kind of how I perceive that whole conversation. Um, so with people that are into spatial, right? Because if you're asking that question, chances are you're into immersive, you're just asking, how do you go about making a deliverable? How do you go about making your first Atmos mix, right? And for the person that's been working in stereo, that's kind of the conventional home producer that maybe has a little bit of outboard gear, is most likely got a set of headphones and they've got a set of monitors, and that's it. Well, there's a couple ways you can go about making uh Atmos mixes. And I think if you're like myself and you're a logic user, it's pretty accessible to get into because the renderer is integrated right into your session. The biggest thing you need to know is that you actually need to clone and create a uh different version of your session because you don't want the stereo version to go away in case you need to revise it. Because you can always down mix uh at most back to stereo information, but oftentimes you might want to have both. So smart idea to duplicate it to start. Sorry, so the other part of it is the big question between binaural versus something like a set of AirPods Pro.

SPEAKER_04 39:04

But this is a good question because uh we were having this conversation with Vince. Uh so typically when someone's gonna mix in Atmos music, okay. I'm not talking about film because uh the renderer can can do all those uh different uh down mixes, but when when someone mixes and sorry, we get into a lot of technical right now, but yeah, modern DAW like logic and pro tools have the renderer built in now, so you can basically flip your mix from stereo to immersive just with just like saving your session. Um would they still do they would still do a stereo, a full stereo mix like a real mix, and then they would do an Atmos mix, they would not use the renderer to down mix, correct?

SPEAKER_02 39:48

Well, this is a great question, and honestly, I have not found any clarity on this because it depends on whose perspective you're following. So, my perspective is of the apogee artists that I have gotten to observe their workflow, and I tend to be most bought into their creative vision, to be very blunt with you. So many of the folks that we see that are working in Atmos are first making stereo and then doing Atmos as a later part of the process. Some people, like Clear Mountain, are doing it simultaneously, but that setup and his one is extremely rare and unique because he has a seven-channel VCA surround compressor that deals with some of this stuff, and then he's doing a print rig that goes out of his uh, usually he's working off of his SSL these days, and then coming back into a separate symphony that's only purpose is to print in that stuff that's coming back from the console. So you could do it as stereo first and atmos second. You could do it as simultaneously if you're doing the Bob method, or what is technically still inside of the Dolby learning certification is to make the Atmos as the primary content and then make everything else as the uh down mixes of that Atmos content, considering that the Dolby Atmos renderer, when you have it as a discrete piece of software, it can make all the other formats from the Atmos mix. So as much as it would be great to say, oh, here's this one method of how to do it, again, when we think about music mixing and Atmos, this is a relatively new thing. I mean, even having a mastering software that's devoted to doing Atmos mastering only just barely got announced. So we're still very much at the beginning end of this stuff, even though we now are seeing, I think, 80 or 90 percent plus of the Billboard top 200 that are all have Atmos compatible mixes.

SPEAKER_04 41:42

Uh quick question, the geek question, because um my background as as you know is more a post-production and in and DAW. Is it uh Steinberg Wavelab that that does mastering? What's the platform?

SPEAKER_02 41:53

Now has it built in as support, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 41:54

That's it, huh? Okay.

SPEAKER_02 41:56

Yeah, correct.

SPEAKER_04 41:56

Okay, good. Uh pretty cool. Thanks. Um and my perception was uh I've been dealing with Dolby Atmos uh as as a post-production professional before, and I knew that the mixer were only doing their atmosphere mix and then re-render to all the different formats after. But I didn't know that some of the mixing engineer for music could be using it. I know the the algorithm sounds amazing, it sounds phenomenal, like when you know Dolby really have their thing together, but I I didn't know that even the mixer could use like when I say the mixer, the music mixer could use the renderer to to spit out stereo mix. That's that's good to know.

SPEAKER_02 42:42

It's new. Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, I think that's one of the things that's kind of cool about Atmos when you dive into it, is like there's actually a lot more resources than people ever expect, and they're just not necessarily curated in a very accessible way. But if you look at, I think it's just learning.uby.com, you'll find a whole site that goes into like Adolby Atmos and how to understand the format and file types and workflows and all kinds of cool stuff, and that's entirely free as a resource, which is really sick. Um, there's something like Adobe Dart, which is about designing rooms that they put up for totally free as well. Um, you know, there's all kinds of different best practices and standard stuff you can find, which is really useful if you're learning about it. So, yeah, I think that there's actually a lot more resources to get into this than people expect. And again, it's sometimes just about knowing where to look. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 43:31

Yeah, they'll be all really keen on on sharing the knowledge because they want people to adopt it.

SPEAKER_05 43:36

Yeah, like I was saying, it's about educating people and hearing is believing.

SPEAKER_04 43:40

True that especially that little anecdote, uh uh you probably aware, but here at SFM we we had a uh an apogee launch event uh with your predecessor, I think, about two or three years ago, and we did a Gen LX system in the in the showroom here, and uh we we had our implement. Coming and listening to the mixes, it was it was a great experience. So I can relate when you said uh Symphony, Genelec, uh so yeah, it sounds great. He got the tingles.

Affordable Ways To Start Mixing

SPEAKER_02 44:11

Yeah, man. It's just really it's one of those things where I think until you until you hear the right song on that kind of system, you can't understand what you're missing out on. Yeah. And I think that's maybe the only part of this that kind of makes me sad is that it's still likely something that's gate kept only because of access. And you know, we've been doing a lot on our side to try to help out with that. Like um, we actually created an entire product all around immersive audio, Symphony Studio. And so much of that product was about trying to figure out not only how to have really complete standards built into the device and make it something that can connect with any DEW, but the other big deal on it was trying to figure out a price point we could put it at that would put it within reach of people. And you know, we were lucky enough to partner up with uh IK Multimedia, who had just put out their eye loud speakers, and now they just quite literally, I think two days ago, released a new sub for that system. So you now have a lot of people that instead of looking at a$50,000 investment to get into Atmos mixing in their studio, they're looking at under 10, sometimes like closer to seven. And that makes it way easier for people to think about adding it in when it's like, oh, I could buy a new bus compressor and that would be sick, but I could also add Atmos as a deliverable. And from the business aspect, it's kind of a lot easier to justify that most of the time.

SPEAKER_04 45:29

And you we we we did talk a little bit about uh the uh the the minutia of making uh Atmos of making Atmos mixes, but any advice you'd have for someone you already sold me on it now, uh so even if you didn't you didn't like to sell me something, but uh let's say I want to move into Atmos. I I want to I want to do it now. Uh you mentioned about bundles, uh uh the the the price to the price to start mixing in Atmos is getting more and more uh less and less expensive. The format has democratized uh much more. The the the uh the renderer are built into all the tools we use every day. Uh what would be a piece of advice you'd have for someone who wants to start?

SPEAKER_02 46:14

Yeah, so there's kind of different levels you can get into it at. So I think I mentioned previously that the kind of entry point for a lot of folks that are just hobbyists and they don't necessarily have a full recording studio, probably their entry point is likely to be a set of AirPod Pro or AirPod Macs as a way of being able to conceive of that spatial information. Those are actually pretty decent as your first exposure if you're just trying to take a session you have, turn it into immersive, and then like maybe you have a friend that's able to do a reference check on a real 7.1.4 system. It's a totally viable standpoint to start from. Um, the other one I would recommend if you're going headphone-based is uh you can run binaural headphones, and if you have a set of open backs that are pretty decent in their response, especially if you're running like Sunerworks Sound ID or something like that to flatten them out a little bit more as well. That's not a bad starting point, and that's definitely enhanced if you then add in like an HRTF file on top of it, which can then make it really feel like things are pinpointed in specific rooms. So I think that that's definitely one of the ways of improving the binaural experience really significantly. And then I think probably the next big step, which is what most people are going to be doing them in the project studio kind of uh territory, is if they're looking to actually deliver Atmos mixes, chances are you're gonna want to have a 7.1.4 speaker system. And right now, our Symphony Studio with the IK bundle of speakers is definitely one of the easiest entry points towards that, that is the cheapest, most complete, and also just sounds the best. So I think that those are kind of the three different levels I perceive as to your level of investment from it. You know, you can go from a consumer product on one end and kind of at least get an understanding of the experience, or you can go all the way up to having, you know, the full speaker playback system. And, you know, the only steps that are above that are going into bigger systems and you know, more detailed speakers, really.

Binaural And HRTF Made Simple

SPEAKER_04 48:09

And uh for the benefit of our audience, uh, can you elaborate a little bit? Uh you mentioned binaural a couple of times already and HRTF. Uh I know what they are. Maybe some of our listeners don't know. So maybe maybe you can just explain a little bit uh what what is uh um binaural and then HRTF.

SPEAKER_02 48:30

Yeah, so binaural is a funny technology because it can be a microphone technology or it can be a speaker technology, like specifically in headphones, because it's really simulating someone's ears in particular, in either case. So uh Apogee actually, funny enough, had a product that was both for a second called Ambio.

SPEAKER_04 48:48

Yeah, I remember.

SPEAKER_02 48:49

The idea of binaural has existed for a long time. I mean, there's been these kind of strange microphones you might see around a recording studio that looks like it's a crash test dummy, and those literally have ear holes. And the idea is what if the microphone was able to hear the same way that your ears take in information? And so binaural came about as a way of trying to create that from both a capture standpoint and a playback standpoint. So something like Ambio just took those two things, put them into a single product, and made them so you could, you know, record that from your phone. Binaural for the most part these days, the way we think about it in modern mixing is really around being able to represent either surround or atmos playback inside of a two-speaker headphone setup.

SPEAKER_04 49:35

Interesting. Thanks. That's that's exactly what I was looking for. And HRTF, if I'm not mistaken, is taking a picture of your hear, correct?

SPEAKER_02 49:44

And yeah, so it accounts for the differences of physiology between different people. And if you look at my ears versus your ears, they physically will look different. You know, your length of your lobe is different, the way that your ear folds happen before it gets to the eardrum is different, maybe the angle of projection is different. And so an HRTF, I think the literal translation of it is like headphone-related transfer function, which sounds like gobbledygook, but the part of it that is important is that it's able to conceptualize how your ears perceive a space. And so essentially, all that these files are doing is they're making it so that they take a uh regular playback scenario and they specify it to be more like how your ears would hear that inside of a simulated environment. And usually HT uh RTFs are actually taken in physical places too. So they commonly are done inside of recording studios, and you can basically have profiles of these that are loaded that will give you the impression of listening in different physical acoustic spaces.

SPEAKER_04 50:47

Interesting, very interesting.

SPEAKER_02 50:50

And it really helps too. I mean, for binaural, let me tell you, I don't think I would actually like mixing a full record in binaural that way, just because I don't love how they do the psychoacoustics at the height information. They're using the Doppler effect as part of it. I just don't think it sounds convincing. I just commonly am out of my experience by doing it. But you listen to it with HTRTF on, all of a sudden it's like, oh, this actually feels like I'm listening to speakers in a room. There's a notable improvement.

The Future Of Immersive Playback

SPEAKER_04 51:21

Cool. Thanks for uh for explaining. Um and what do you think the future looks like for uh for for multi-chat for immersive audio? Do you think that eventually we'll have a hundred speakers? Or you know, that's almost a joke, you know. It's uh the speaker manufacturer would love that, like even more speakers, but no jokes, jokes aside, like what do you think is the future for immersive audio?

SPEAKER_02 51:47

Yeah, as much as it might be a joke, you know, stranger things have happened, right? I think uh one of the weird things to think about with uh general audio is that it's become so much better sounding and so much cheaper. Like if you've ever put on those headphones from like the I think it's 60s or 50s, back when they weighed like five pounds and they just sounded awful because the driver technology wasn't there, like we have come a tremendous way that even your iPhone speaker being able to sound, able to represent bass frequencies is like a pretty remarkable thing when it comes to technology. So things have gotten smaller, they've gotten better sounding, and they've gotten radically more inexpensive, right? So you gotta imagine that if that's what's happened previously, it's a pretty decent predictor of the future. So it's not incredible to think that, like, even right now, as we think about, you know, seven or ten grand as being a significant investment towards mixing immersive audio, that trend is gonna be for more products to get in that space. You know, right now, ILoud and Cali are playing inside of it. There's gonna be a lot more companies that will come in as well that will start to compete and make better products that are again miniaturized, allow for non-conventional studio spaces, smaller footprints, more convenient kind of setup processes. And no doubt over time it will become better and cheaper and smaller. I think that that is a predictable consequence for sure of where we're heading with it. The thing I'm excited for is when it becomes convenient for consumers to have a full 7.1.4 experience. I mean, I think that right now you're seeing, you know, things like Cadillac and some of these higher-end brands like Mercedes-Benz that are building Atmos systems into cars. That's cool, but like I want it to be in every beater Honda out there. The second that that happens, all of a sudden you're gonna have people that are listening to hip-hop that's got crazy ringshift modulated hi-hats that are moving over places, and it'll be like standard fare as part of certain specific genres. Like, I think that's the place we're moving to where eventually you'll start to have paradigms and things that are annoying about how common they are as parts of a genre production that become immutable and related to immersive audio. I think that that is ultimately where we're going. And when I think you have uh speaker systems that are able to represent it that are well within people's reaches and are not just, you know, psycho-acoustic tricks to show this stuff, but really truly meaningfully different than trying to fit everything into two speakers. I think that's when you're gonna see a lot more people that are like, oh, we have arrived. This is the new world we're living in, kind of like what happened with people having access to video creation with the smartphone. Like it was a world that was kind of uh radical if you look at it and like, you know, I'm a uh a big uh fan of vintage computer collecting because of some of my friends at the University of Washington. And a couple of them collect these old machines called video toasters. Yeah, remember the funniest old school 80s uh production computer that was like all about sticking it to the man with small budgets and being able to disrupt huge news entities by able to do this stuff with like I think it was still a 20 or 30 grand computer you'd have to buy, but it was considered like super revolutionary, and then all of a sudden, smartphones come out in the 2000s, and all of a sudden everyone can capture and edit content and be able to disrupt music cycles, right? So I think that very similarly you'll find that when it becomes ubiquitous, the people that are interacting with it will then define the format, but it will also become a part of popular culture in a way that's inseparable. I think that that's the ultimate time when it's arrived arrived once you're past the early adopter stage, you know?

SPEAKER_03 55:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 55:25

So it's just gonna there has to be a bit of a shift somewhere. Yes. Yeah, yeah. It's time to get back into uh car audio installs.

SPEAKER_04 55:38

Our first podcast, where we're by the way, we're we're we are recording our L Event today, so uh but the first one ten episodes ago, this is where we introduced ourselves and we we learned that Franco was begun with the the car audio. So when when the car audio is gonna start having like more speakers, maybe Franco's gonna be back in business.

SPEAKER_02 55:59

I'll be installing some immersive speakers. I will say this though, one thing that is uh deceptive about immersive audio is people sometimes think that like there's kind of a limitless amount of speakers you could add, and like, oh, wouldn't all of those be super incrementally better? I'm actually not super convinced of that. Yeah, I think that to a large extent there is like a diminishing return after a certain point. And if you've ever listened to a 7.1.4 system versus like a 9.2.6 system, yeah. Tell me what is really appreciably different about those two things aside from what was appropriate to the studio design in the space, you know? Yeah, I do agree. I think that to most people the cool thing is that it is unlikely to be that you have to have 200 speakers to experience the phenomenon, it has to be within certain bounds. And for us working in music mixing, it's actually fairly clear that it's 7.1.4. That's like the way of getting into it that gives you the full fat experience, you know?

Final Thoughts And Farewell

SPEAKER_04 56:54

But this is something uh the sphere at Las Vegas didn't they didn't get the memo, right? They didn't listen to the podcast. Uh well that that was uh that was a great show.

SPEAKER_03 57:06

Uh any anything we we forgot to ask while we have the uh no, I mean I we we can we can spend an eternity on on just this subject, but um no, I think it was a great it was a great time to get to answer a lot of our questions, uh, but hopefully it helped answer a lot of questions that the audience may have had, especially on something. I mean, we've we've had we started having a theme on immersive experiences altogether, whether it's video or audio. Um but this is a perfect example where I think um with COVID and it made everybody lock down and kind of slow down a bit. I'd love to see a lot more people just slow down and listen to music like they did back in the vinyl days and just kind of appreciate the nuances of all those wonderful things and especially that artists are getting like the artists I I like you were saying that are wanting to create music in Atmos from inception. I think that's uh that's really cool and really important.

SPEAKER_04 58:04

I just hope a lot more people are gonna adopt it and and appreciate those back maybe to close back to that point of uh what you was saying or what George was saying earlier, where in the in the 70s and the 80s, people people were sitting to listen to music, but at the time producing music was much more expensive and it was reserved only for it was not democratized at all. So we live we live in a a great era of digital and music is democracy, like music production and even multi-channel music production is now democratized at the point where oh yeah, you are teaching at most classes to the masses. So, you know, we we live in a fantastic time. Yeah, what a fantastic time! Yeah, no doubt.

SPEAKER_02 58:50

It's super easy to become pessimistic and think, oh, all the best music has already been made, or oh, it was really the glory days when things were this way. It's like no, any of them would trade this for that in a moment, and you know that that's true, right? That's true. I'm sure that if Johnny Mitchell was able to conceive of things in Atmos, that would have been considered awesome.

SPEAKER_03 59:09

Yep, yeah, good point. Awesome. Well, George, thank you so much for uh for coming on to our podcast. We'd love to have you again and pick your brain on some more stuff. Uh, because apogee is no, I mean, we we just hit on apogee on the immersive side, but we we can spend weeks on the yeah, it's true.

SPEAKER_02 59:30

Yeah, and if you well, I would be happy to be back, guys. Thanks for making it a good time. And uh, you know, I think one of the things that's important is people getting their heads around this stuff. So anything that we can do to support it, you know, my mission again and the apogee's mission is very aligned. We really want to make sure that we're not only making some of the best products within digital audio and making the best sounding stuff, but also making it so people can hit their creative potential. So yeah, I'm happy to do stuff like this that helps take some of this stuff that is really inherently confusing because there's disagreement about it and it looks like it's official and make it into something that's more palatable.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:02

Yeah. Amazing, amazing. Thank you, George. Thanks so much, George George. Welcome.