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On Stage

Learn how to set up and experience immersive sound at live events where music envelops your audience from every direction.

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Immersive audio can really elevate a concert by giving the audience a shared immersive experience. You can put the audience inside the music and engage their sense of direction with sound positioning and 3D effects. You can use the physical space as an instrument through contrast between sound positions - like positioning everything on stage during the verse followed by a 3D wall of sound during the chorus. You can play with the position of the stage in the space.
But you also need to be aware of the extra work and pitfalls of an immersive production...

Venues

More and more venues are being equipped with immersive sound systems. There are venues with full 360° setups with loudspeakers on the side, at the rear and above the audience - sometimes even below. These give you the full 3D experience.

Some venues feature frontal 180° setups, which consist of rows of loudspeakers at the front, above the stage. This gives you more accurate 2D localization than a typical stereo setup.

For live venues, custom loudspeaker setups are defined inside an immersive engine, a hardware or software solution that translates your chosen sound source positions in a virtual 3D space to the actual loudspeaker setup. There are many different immersive engines, but only a handful are actively used in Belgium and its surrounding countries.

Club Wintercircus (Ghent, L-Acoustics and Areal)

Bootstraat (Hasselt, FLUX::)
CCHa (Kleine Theaterzaal, Hasselt, d&b)
Schouwburg Kortrijk (Utoop, Kortrijk, Yamaha)

De Bijloke (Ghent, d&b)

HetPaleis (Antwerp, L-Acoustics)

Some festivals, such as Tomorrowland and CORE festival, are equipped with surround setups that upmix stereo sound through the Areal Upmix Engine.Occasionally, you will find pop-up immersive venues powered by the 4DSound system.

Pre-production

As engineer, it pays off to prepare your immersive show in advance. Besides the show file in your console, you will need to create a second show file for the immersive engine.
If you are offered rehearsal time in the venue, be sure to make use of it when possible, as you will get to experience ahead of time what it takes to mix in 3 dimensions.
Some immersive engines allow pre-production inside the software with monitoring on speakers or via binaural rendering, a 2-channel headphone simulation of the 3D immersive soundfield.

[Read more about Pre-production in the knowledge hub]

Monitoring

While the audience gets to experience immersive audio on speakers, artists usually don't. The only time they get to experience the same immersive sound is when they perform in the middle of the venue inside the loudspeaker setup, without dedicated monitoring. But this is a rare occasion.
Artists with in-ear monitoring can experience immersive through a binaural mix. There are hardware solutions such as KLANG which can provide personalized binaural mixes.
But you don't have to listen in binaural to do an immersive concert. Most artists don't, although there are artists who tour with KLANG for stereo concerts, because they prefer the sound over a conventional stereo monitor mix.

[Read more about monitering in the knowledge hub]

Mixing

The difference between stereo and immersive mixing is that the console doesn't sum the audio in the master bus. If you want to make full use of an immersive system, you need to send out each individual track on the console as a direct-out to the immersive engine.
Immersive mixing is not necessarily harder than stereo.
For some elements like vocals, the amplified sound position will need to match the visual position of a singer in the space. Low-end heavy sounds like bass cannot easily be localized by people in a room, so you shouldn't spend too much time on them.

[Read more about mixing in the knowledge hub]

Nightlife and upmixing

Usually for the nightlife scene, performers do not provide access to a multitrack or stems from a recording. DJs will almost always work from stereo mixes.
In such cases upmixing - processing a stereo recording to distribute it over a multichannel loudspeaker setup - may be beneficial. The goal of an upmix is to retain the intention of the original stereo mix, but convert it in real-time to more speakers.

[Read more about nightlife and upmixing in the knowledge hub]

Knowledge Hub

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