Immersive on stage
If you're thinking of choosing immersive audio for your live productions, there are important considerations to be made. 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.
The amount of loudspeakers and their position in the venue depends on a space's dimensions, capacity, design, layout, etc. As such, immersive live systems don't rely on the standardized loudspeaker setups you would find in the recorded music field. 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. In many cases, the loudspeaker and engine come from the same manufacturer, but that is not required. There are many different immersive engines, but only a handful are actively used in Belgium and its surrounding countries.
360° venues in Belgium include Club Wintercircus (Ghent, L-Acoustics and Areal), Bootstraat (Hasselt, FLUX::), CCHa (Kleine Theaterzaal, Hasselt, d&b), Schouwburg Kortrijk (Utoop, Kortrijk, Yamaha).
180° venues in Belgium include 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.
For reference, L-Acoustics has a worldwide list of L-ISA venues and d&b has highlighted a few Soundscape venues in their Applications section.
Pre-production
As engineer, it pays 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 an immersive venue comes with an in-house spatial engineer, they will guide you through the immersive process and should provide you with engine file templates configured for the venue.
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. This means you can simply install the engine software on your computer, create a new show file or use a venue's template file and start experimenting. If you have a multitrack recording of a previous show, you can route each track into the software, create an audio source for each track and listen back to the mix either on a limited amount of speakers or through headphones. This workflow is offered in L-Acoustics L-ISA Studio and d&b CreateControl with vCore, which covers most of the immersive venues in Belgium.
Engine software will come with grouping of sources, snapshots so you can create different mixes for each track or section, effects like 3D reverb, occasionally movement- or trajectory-based effects and more. The creative potential of these tools is significant, so be sure to explore them.
As of late 2026, there is no easy way to convert one manufacturer's show file to another's, which means you have to start from scratch every time you encounter a new immersive engine. This essentially means starting from scratch.
If you're touring multiple venues with a variety of engines, you may want to consider creating submixes in your console or DAW or considering renting or buying your own software engine. Working with submixes means you can pre-mix a lot in advance and already configure all of your effects outside of the engine. You will just have to position the submix outputs in the venue's engine and that's mostly it. You will not use of the full potential of each venue's system, but that does not have to be an issue.
Alternatively, there are software-only engines which can run on your computer. You can rent software like FLUX:: SPAT Revolution for a limited period, prepare your whole show in it and use it instead of the venue's engine by routing your mix straight to the amplifiers. You only have to input the venue's speaker setup into SPAT before each show and you are done. There are also free immersive engines like Envelop4Live, a collection of Max4Live devices to use with Ableton Live, or Ircam Spat~ which allows you to build your own engine in Max/MSP.
Our research team is currently developing software to automatically convert immersive engine show files from one system to the other.
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.
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. From then on, you can position each track as its own audio source in the engine software. This gives you maximum flexilibity.
We recommend you invest in an audio-over-IP or digital audio protocol such as Audinate Dante, Milan-AVB or MADI. This will allow you to easily send out all audio tracks over a simple network or BNC cable.
Immersive mixing is not necessarily harder than stereo. Some engineers will claim that immersive mixing is easier if you can mix well in stereo, as you have less tracks summing to the same speaker.
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.
Acoustic instruments like drums can be captured with immersive or ambisonic microphone configurations as immersive kit mics, allowing you to turn them into immersive sources. [More on that here]
When designing effects, be mindful of moving audio sources around too much. A repetitive or predictable effect will quickly lose its novelty and risk coming across as a gimmick. You can do a lot with 3D reverbs and some clever microphone configurations. Everything is a matter of taste, and you are still forming your opinion at this point. If you want to explore movement more, you can check out Grapes-3D.
There are consoles that integrate with immersive engines via Open Sound Control (OSC), allowing you to manipulate audio sources straight from your console. For this you will need to set up a control network separate from any other audio network. This can be an unmanaged network switch, just connect console and engine to it and make sure to stay out of the audio network IP-range.
OSC can also be used for show control. There is a standardized list of OSC messages for immersive engines called ADM-OSC. The full specification can be found here. On top of that, QLab has built-in support for OSC control of FLUX:: SPAT Revolution, L-Acoustics L-ISA, d&b Soundscape, Adamson Fletcher Machine and more. You can use software like TouchOSC and Max/MSP aswell, or even program a StreamDeck with buttons which trigger actions in the engine.
Some engines will follow MIDI Timecode (MTC), which will allow triggering snapshots or effects at certain timecodes. Some also support control of parameters via MIDI, which allows you to customize support in a console via MIDI or give an artist control of part of the immersive soundfield via their MIDI instruments. A lot of opportunities, but try to limit yourself at the beginning...
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. Even in cases where they layer multiple songs together or transition between songs, it is still a combination of a handful of 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.
There are a number of approaches to upmixing for nightlife. The first is L-Acoustics DJ, which uses machine learning technology to separate a stereo mix into 4 stems. DJs can use the LA-DJC hardware controller or the L-Acoustics DJ App to position the 4 stems and use custom-created effects to move them around. L-Acoustics DJ integrates into an existing L-ISA system, but cannot be used without one. The stem separation adds a 19ms latency.
The Areal Upmix Engine is a hardware device which can be configured for a venue's exact loudspeaker setup. It is less focused on moving things around (a positive in our opinion), but more focused on retaining the intention of the original stereo mix. Latency remains under 9ms.
The Spatial Mixer hardware from Ambrio Sound provides Ableton Live integration and allows moving a number of stereo mixes around in the soundfield. It is similar to L-Acoustics DJ, except it doesn't use stem separation and has limited outputs to a 2D surround setup (no speakers above the audience).
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