Earlier than Karlheinz Brandenburg revolutionized how we retailer music, he was obsessive about how we understand it. Now, the engineer who compressed your whole music library into pocket-sized recordsdata is now increasing sound past the confines of bodily area.
On this planet of audio know-how, few figures loom as massive as Brandenburg. The German mathematician and pc scientist who helped reward the world MP3—that tiny file format that will ultimately upend your complete music trade—is now bending sound waves in much more bold methods by his newest enterprise, Brandenburg Labs.
Its new crown jewel, Okeanos Professional, may seem like mere headphones to the uninitiated, however they characterize a significant leap in spatial audio. Priced at €5,000, a relative cut price in comparison with the multi-speaker studio setups they’re designed to switch, the system is powered by their proprietary Deep Dive Audio (DDA) know-how to create an phantasm so compelling that customers neglect they’re sporting headphones in any respect.
EDM.com demoed the mind-bending Okeanos Professional system at Austin’s illustrious South by Southwest convention, the place Brandenburg Labs was a finalist for the 2025 SXSW Innovation Awards within the Audio Expertise class. The tech maps your listening area by acoustic calibration after which astoundingly tracks your head’s place and rotation in actual time, adjusting the sound discipline accordingly with six levels of freedom.
For music producers, this implies the power to position sounds with surgical precision in a digital surroundings, testing mixes throughout totally different speaker configurations with out ever leaving their headphones. The system can course of as much as 16 channels of audio and obtain immersive binaural audio with latency as little as 10ms, rivaling bodily speaker arrays costing multiples extra.
Its web-based interface offers a seamless management system and all processing occurs on the devoted {hardware}, protecting your DAW’s CPU meters from having a meltdown. Whereas rivals have tried comparable spatial audio tips, none have fairly but achieved the Brandenburg crew’s degree of immersion—maybe unsurprising given the founder’s pedigree.
There is a explicit form of magic in making ears consider what they’re listening to—simply ask the person who continues to vary how the world listens. We caught up with Brandenburg to debate the way forward for spatial audio and the way his modern firm is influencing it.
Dominique Wollniok/Brandenburg Labs GmbH
EDM.com: The MP3 format revolutionized audio by prioritizing accessibility over absolute constancy, a trade-off that sparked a long time of debate. With Okeanos Professional, you are now pushing the boundaries of spatial audio precision. How do you reconcile your legacy of compression with this new pursuit of uncompressed, high-fidelity immersion?
Karlheinz Brandenburg: Whereas MP3 was a great compromise, I’ve labored on increasing audio high quality for many of my life. AAC as utilized by Apple, whereas being much more environment friendly in compression and utilizing comparable primary concepts, satisfies even so-called “golden ears.”
25 years in the past, I supervised work on Wave Subject Synthesis. This permits nice immersive audio in case you have a room which has dozens of loudspeakers and good acoustics. The issue of attaining the same expertise through headphones had not been solved, till now. Okeanos Professional is the primary headphone system that allows a really life like and lifelike audio expertise.
EDM.com: You’ve got spent your profession democratizing audio know-how. Do you envision a future the place Deep Dive Audio trickles right down to consumer-grade headphones, or is that this degree of precision inherently unique to the professional audio area of interest?
Karlheinz Brandenburg: No, it’s not unique to the professional audio area of interest. Our Deep Dive Audio know-how may also be accessible to common customers. We’re growing a headphone system that brings immersive audio into each front room. With Okeanos Residence, anybody can have a simulated high-end multi-speaker system through headphones to take pleasure in music, motion pictures or gaming. We plan to launch these headphones available on the market finish of 2026.
Within the longer run, we envision a headphone know-how we name PARty, Personalised Auditory Actuality. This will probably be a game-changer for all of us, doing for our ears what glasses do for our imaginative and prescient. It would allow AI-supported selective noise cancelling and absolutely adaptive listening to actual and digital sound sources. We estimate that these headphones will probably be offered in eight-digit numbers, making them accessible and inexpensive for everybody. Immersive audio is only one characteristic of those headphones.
EDM.com: The MP3 format essentially modified not solely how we devour music, but additionally the music trade’s whole enterprise mannequin. Do you see Okeanos Professional’s know-how having the same disruptive potential for music manufacturing and consumption?
Karlheinz Brandenburg: MP3 freed music from the provider medium and made it accessible in all places. The standard and established distribution channels for music have thus been turned the wrong way up.
Okeanos Professional has disruptive potential when it comes to sound high quality. It simplifies the manufacturing of immersive sound by making conventional and infrequently very costly speaker setups superfluous. This will increase the possibility that 3D sound will lastly catch on, providing quite a few alternatives for your complete leisure trade. Furthermore, spatial audio permits audio augmented actuality, which can undoubtedly be a game-changer.
EDM.com: Deep Dive Audio’s 6DoF head-tracking and room calibration promise a hyper-realistic loudspeaker simulation, however some engineers argue that binaural audio—irrespective of how superior—can by no means absolutely replicate the tactile and psychoacoustic expertise of bodily audio system. What is the one limitation of headphone-based spatial audio that retains you up at night time, and the way shut do you assume Okeanos Professional will get to bridging that hole?
Karlheinz Brandenburg: It’s unavoidable that some tactile suggestions, like the sensation of low frequencies vibrating the entire physique at a reside live performance, just isn’t reproducible with binaural audio over headphones. Audio system are a fantastic know-how to attain that. Nonetheless, the true potential of binaural audio lies within the purposes which speaker methods can’t simply obtain.
Binaural audio permits us to simulate arbitrary acoustic scenes, which aren’t restricted by any speaker association. Even right now, it manages to let individuals neglect they’re sporting headphones when arrange accurately. The large problem we’re now attempting to unravel is to verify this works robotically for everybody and in all places, with only a pair of headphones and no particular data required by the person.
EDM.com: The professional audio market is notoriously conservative and engineers usually stick with trusted manufacturers for many years. How do you propose to persuade skeptical studio veterans to ditch their monitor setups for a headphone-based system like Okeanos Professional, particularly when it challenges a long time of ingrained workflow habits?
Karlheinz Brandenburg: All disruptive applied sciences initially set off skepticism. Our declare is: “It’s a must to hear it to consider it.” And certainly, everybody who tries our system says: “There’s by no means been something prefer it.”
The most important benefit of Okeanos Professional is that it lets you combine multi-channel audio in any studio with unparalleled flexibility, because of its independence from bodily audio system and room configurations. To speak this, we exhibit at quite a few occasions, commerce festivals or exhibitions worldwide and preserve shut contact with music producers.
Initially, our system was only a proof-of-concept—we did not plan to promote it. Nonetheless, at commerce exhibits and exhibitions we’ve got been requested a number of instances by audio engineers and producers to launch our early-stage know-how as a product. This turned Okeanos Professional.
Okeanos Professional is a instrument that may enhance and modernize workflows. In the end, engineers will resolve the way to use it. Veterans with a world-renowned, legendary studio setup and perfected workflow may selected to solely complement their workflow, as an illustration when working from residence or demonstrating the results of their work at a distinct place. For others, Okeanos Professional could function a viable various for a full multi-speaker system and even as their solely gateway to immersive mixing.
EDM.com: Brandenburg Labs is getting into an area the place immersive audio codecs like Dolby Atmos and Sony 360 Actuality Audio are battling for dominance. How does Okeanos Professional place itself on this format struggle: as a impartial instrument agnostic to requirements, or as a champion of a selected workflow?
Karlheinz Brandenburg: Okeanos Professional would not require or favor any format. Customers can configure their digital speaker system nonetheless they like, irrespective of if it is among the two large names, an rising format or perhaps a loopy speaker setup that the producer needs to experiment with. Okeanos Professional can simulate it. Even higher, Okeanos Professional permits producers to change between speaker configurations with just some clicks, providing unmatched flexibility and compatibility.
EDM.com: At €5,000, the system undercuts a full 16-channel speaker setup, however it’s nonetheless a major funding in a crowded headphone market the place rivals provide high-end choices at lower cost factors. What’s your technique to justify that premium to cost-conscious producers who may see spatial audio as a “nice-to-have” slightly than essential?
Karlheinz Brandenburg: Okeanos Professional presents a brand new method to mixing through headphones. A key good thing about the system is that it simulates a speaker system within the producer’s studio, a well-recognized surroundings. For a lot of professionals, this can be a must-have characteristic. The costs to check to aren’t commonplace headphones as a result of they can not reproduce immersive audio in the way in which ours do. The purpose of comparability is a multichannel loudspeaker system in an acoustically handled room. Once we exhibit our system and speak to potential clients, all of the professionals inform us that it’s fairly priced.
At this stage, spatial audio continues to be an rising know-how. Each producers and clients are nonetheless studying the probabilities, limitations and the enchantment of the know-how, and I’m positive the market will hold evolving.
There have been additionally doubts concerning the introduction of stereo. George Harrison from the Beatles additionally questioned why two audio system have been wanted again then. Over time, stereo sound caught on and have become the usual. What I am attempting to say is that we’re going through a brand new paradigm shift that can take time for music creators to just accept.
The event can be strongly linked to demand. The extra 3D audio is used, the extra music producers will bounce on the bandwagon. Our headphone system can speed up this course of proper now. I feel the buyer marketplace for spatial audio methods at the moment doesn’t provide a passable resolution for everybody. Bridging this hole will probably be a key think about figuring out whether or not the present wave of spatial audio continues.
Source link
