Martin Rieger Interview

2:31 Luke F. Walton What's good everybody this is Scoobert Doobert welcome back to love music more I am joined with my amazing guest Martin Rieger

2:43 Martin Rieger Okay, sorry, I forgot we did this. I was, oh no, right, it's in the post.

2:48 Luke F. Walton Yes So Martin also what's your studio name?

2:54 Martin Rieger it's VR tonung or tonung if you if you just pronounce it as it is written it's a German pun so I'm not sure if it makes sense to explain it because you can guess how funny it must be in German so

3:07 Martin Rieger yeah a small percentage of the love music more audience is cracking up right now so the the main thing that we're going to be talking about if you couldn't tell with the vr bit is talking about immersive audio the future of audio sound production sound design

3:20 Luke F. Walton Fine. I'm creating these virtual worlds and obviously we just had the Apple Vision Pro just get released. So we've got a lot to talk about. I'm really excited. First, I just want to start and ask you kind of how did you get into this side of the industry? What attracted you to this?

3:37 Martin Rieger Yeah, good question. I mean, I started as a film composer, so I do have a strong background in music, but turns out I can't do music all day. I mean, there are people who can do that and props to them, congratulations, but after like a few hours, I'm like, oh my God, this is exhausting. So I figured I also like to do like some sound design, to do also recordings.

3:57 Martin Rieger So I ended up basically doing sound on vision, like for films, for documentaries, commercials. but then suddenly a friend of mine was like hey do you know 360 like how do you do sound for that i was i have no idea but give it give it to me and i wore a vr headset like it was like if you put a smartphone into like a cardboard thing but

4:17 Martin Rieger Yes, yes. still i was like oh my god this is the future and i don't want to do anything else so i did and i basically declined every normal film job podcast music production job i had back then and was like

4:30 Martin Rieger like now i'm vr tonung i do the vr thing now like sound for vr and i was so hooked of the possibilities that you can do with it and i guess that's exactly what we want to talk about today because everybody's like immersive audio oh that's still the utmost i'm like no that's just a tiny thing that you can do with immersive audio but there's so much more also regarding music so i thought people should know

4:52 Luke F. Walton I love it. And when was this? When did you kind of start your pivot? pivot to this.

4:57 Martin Rieger It was 2016 was a wild year, by the way. I'm not sure if you remember,

5:03 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

5:03 Martin Rieger but a lot of things happened actually like Facebook, they bought a little sound startup, which was called Two Big Ears back then and made it their go-to standard and also made free tools to mix for in ambisonics like an immersive audio format back then. Also YouTube said, oh, we will also want to support spatial audio. So since 2016.

5:23 Martin Rieger youtube supports spatial audio for 360 readers because it always sounds like a very specific thing that i'm doing but on the other hand like millions or like even billions of people could experience it just on youtube so 2016 wild year also sennheiser brought out their ambio vr mic i'm not sure you may have seen the

5:44 Martin Rieger Yes, golden I've looking seen uh with it. four microphones in one so yeah that you can record immersive audio so So wild times at the right time, at the right space, I guess.

5:54 Martin Rieger Yes. And I realized that I want to be part of that.

5:58 Luke F. Walton I love it. So I have so many questions. Maybe I should start with kind of what would just general public would be curious about. Do you need to have a whole bunch of speakers in order to experience this?

6:13 Martin Rieger No you don't, Dolby wants you to buy a lot of speakers and to buy a lot of hardware-enabling you to have like this immersive experience. But spoiler alert, you just need normal pair of headphones.

6:25 Martin Rieger Like even no special head-tracking whatnot technology because we humans, we do have just two ears and still we can hear three-dimensionally. So if the sound is mixed right or recorded right with special microphones or special mixing techniques...

6:40 Martin Rieger techniques yes but then still everybody who owns a pair of headphone can experience binaural audio which is the term for this but of course we can get into the deeper terminologies like why you would maybe buy special pair of headphones or special microphones but long story short this is why I'm hooked with headphones everybody has headphones and if done right you can mix a 3D audio for everybody

7:01 Luke F. Walton Interesting. So tell me a little bit about those special pairs of headphones. I'm not actually really familiar with this. Are there different They're different. They're different ones that are tooled. I guess like the Apple Pro Max or something.

7:12 Martin Rieger Exactly.

7:13 Luke F. Walton Are

7:13 Martin Rieger There you

7:13 Luke F. Walton they go. doing that? That's probably the most, I don't know, widely purchased made for spatial audio kind of headphones. Yeah.

7:21 Martin Rieger You really need to be careful when you buy a new pair of headphones because everybody says, oh, we now support 3D audio. But as I just said, you don't need a special pair of headphones to experience 3D audio. But I would say it rather depends on the content. If it works good, it's not dependent on the headphone.

7:39 Martin Rieger But now there's like an extra step which is called head tracking, which is basically like some gyroscope sensors in your headphone and they know where you are looking at and how you move your head. And this is what Apple now called spatial audio. Super confusing because now everything is spatial audio and immersive and whatnot. So that's why I try to do to add my two cents that you know.

8:00 Martin Rieger So hey, if you want to have head tracking make sure you look for this type of spatial audio and

8:05 Martin Rieger Okay. all it does basically is renders your sound in real time depending on where you're looking at because normal headphones they just playback normally no matter where you look at but with spatial audio you move your head and the sound field rotates accordingly and this is what got me really interested in the term like with 360 videos it's the same technology but for sound

8:26 Martin Rieger That makes sense. So then like we were talking about earlier about a potential 360 podcast where you would turn your head to look at one guest, you turn your head to look at the other and with spatial audio enabled headphones, your head tracking would be able to kind of be like, oh, he's looking at X or he's looking at Y and adjust the audio in real time.

8:46 Martin Rieger Exactly. But even for that you wouldn't need a special pair of headphones because

8:49 Martin Rieger Okay. the sound is implemented, you can think of it as a multi-channel audio that's

8:54 Martin Rieger Okay. down mixed in real time to two channels of stereo. So it always checks where are you looking at and this is, you know, the 360 videos are like very weird projections but

9:05 Martin Rieger Yes. it only filters out like one screen that you're looking at. Right. And if you move around your mouse, the video You also adopt accordingly, but also the sound would adopt accordingly and mix down those multiple channels into two so that if you if somebody's on the left you would hear the person on the left, but if you move to the person it would move to the front to you. So that's the same thing for the sound.

9:27 Luke F. Walton um so on that on that point is the is the mixing down to two channels or like the the stuff that at least dolby atmos was pitching me on is it's infinitely compatible up or down you add more

9:39 Martin Rieger Mm.

9:39 Luke F. Walton speakers it works better you add less speakers it goes more binaural um was that uh was that a shift because i remember like you know 5.1 7.1 surround sound has been around yeah since the 80s or something um what was the what was the the shift that was like okay now we've gone from surround sound

9:56 Martin Rieger bounce down to ambisonic or spatial or atmos or whatever you know fill in the blank what what was that what was that change is it the down is it the down mixing

10:06 Martin Rieger The fundamental technology under it is called object-based audio, which this, I'm not sure, are you familiar with that?

10:13 Luke F. Walton Otherwise, Yes.

10:13 Martin Rieger I try to keep it short and

10:15 Luke F. Walton No,

10:15 Martin Rieger not

10:15 Luke F. Walton no,

10:15 Martin Rieger too

10:15 Luke F. Walton no, please.

10:15 Martin Rieger complicated.

10:16 Luke F. Walton I took an Atmos course so that I didn't get too left behind in this world.

10:21 Martin Rieger Right.

10:22 Luke F. Walton But for the guests, I mean, there are a lot of people that listen to this podcast that are bedroom producers or just music fans. And so, yeah, explaining what object-based audio even kind of means versus. what traditional panning might look like. I feel like that'd be really valuable.

10:36 Martin Rieger exactly true awesome i would love to um i mean everything we know from stereo and surround is called channel-based audio so you have stereo which is two channels so obviously you have left and right with 5.1 for example you have left right left surround right surround lfe and center there we have it but thinking about it now we want to add a height dimension like this third dimension which is height

11:01 Martin Rieger right we would have to add more speakers and as you can tell oh then we have a lot of audio files playing at the same time so people were thinking how could we solve this and the solution is object-based audio so right now if you have a sound on the left it plays on the left channel you have a sound on the right right channel and if it plays in the middle it somehow plays both channels at the same time which is then mono i guess but object-based is now independent from channels

11:27 Martin Rieger which means you have one audio object which could be a singer and you say I give this object three parameters which is X Y and Z axis and depending on where you move around the singer it is decoded while playing back so while you mix it doesn't really matter if you have two speakers headphones or whatnot and it the information is passed through this object-based container And when the consumer plays back,

11:56 Martin Rieger it would understand, oh, there's a singer and it plays, I don't know, on the left front. And this is where it gets decoded. So it gets interpreted into loudspeakers. And this is where it plays back three-dimensionally.

12:08 Martin Rieger Hmm. So that's the idea. I hope the point came across.

12:12 Luke F. Walton No, I like it. And the way that it ends up getting visualized in the Atmos renderer, I think really helps because there's these little circles. circles that you

12:20 Martin Rieger Yeah,

12:20 Luke F. Walton kind of like little

12:21 Martin Rieger exactly,

12:21 Luke F. Walton little spheres

12:21 Martin Rieger exactly.

12:22 Luke F. Walton that you can move around and then it makes it easier to think like okay no instead of panning on a knob i have this little blob that i'm moving up or down or left or right farther away from me closer to me and over my head and then you can do all the panning techniques that you would normally do automating faders of like flying overhead like a helicopter in a movie theater you know

12:45 Martin Rieger And ideally the technology, like the vision is you do one mix in Okay. an object-based technology, which could be Dolby Atmos or some competitor like MPEG-H just to mention a few names.

12:57 Martin Rieger Cool, And yes. the idea is to do one mix and it transports on any sort of loudspeaker, soundbar, smart speaker or even headphones. But it turns out it's not that easy because as you can tell. So it's a lot. There are a lot of steps involved to make this down mix, for example, for headphones.

13:16 Martin Rieger So some people were disappointed with how they listen to Dolby Atmos on headphones because it tries to replicate how we humans hear. And as you can tell, it's a complicated process. So you have a lot of compromises in the process, which is slowly what Apple tries to fix now. So long term, I would say this is the go to format.

13:38 Martin Rieger That's to mix something in object-based audio and it plays back on any formats perfectly, but that's unfortunately not really the reality as of right now.

13:47 Martin Rieger Yeah. So before we turn to some competitors, because I really want to talk about that, I'd love to just pick your brain on some of the things that I maybe I have gripes with as a mixing engineer.

13:56 Martin Rieger Sure. So one of the struggles that I have adapting mixes from. a two-channel stereo mix to an Atmos mix is I do so many things that blur the speakers so like things like cross talk in a virtual uh Ampex tape recorder or um using micro shift or these different pitch effects to be able to do these blends when I shift my mentality to object-based it almost is like a different philosophy

14:27 Luke F. Walton that i'm bringing to the to the music a little bit more that it almost feels like a real world philosophy of like the guitarist is over there rather than my head it's like no the music becomes like one entity when i'm making a stereo mix because i'm making very modern indie pop whatever um i'm curious like have you have you have you found that the the futuristic technology is

14:52 Luke F. Walton at least in its design made for older style of thinking about music or are you finding new tools and new ways to you know push the limit of sound and create less like feeling of like the guitarist is on my left now and more like i am in a room surrounded by guitar and sound and a wall of sound kind of thing i'm just i'm just curious and on your perspective on vintage you know yeah

15:15 Martin Rieger Oh God, where should we start? I mean, as you can tell, it's... it's Yeah. a huge shift and

15:21 Martin Rieger Yes. even I've been doing that like for eight years now I still learn stuff where I'm like oh I've never really thought about that and that's still there isn't really a rule of thumb as of right now I can just encourage to just mess around and the good thing is see what works and if it works for you just keep doing it don't be disappointed when you buy I don't know 12 louts because it sounds worse than stereo you're

15:45 Martin Rieger that obviously you're doing something You're wrong doing something but wrong. you can make it happen i mean i heard very good examples and

15:51 Martin Rieger Yeah. i feel like that the people doing very good mixes are very experienced and that's an unsatisfying answer everybody wants to have this shortcut but what i can like maybe one tip is what helps a lot is to really think of a sound perspective imagine putting a 360 camera into your studio and then thinking of of where would the musicians sit and

16:14 Martin Rieger Yes. in a stereo mix everybody would be sitting on one chair in front of you which doesn't really translate into a 3d audio so maybe make use of the space and this is what i really like to do to record everything as realistic as possible like how it was and this transports really good into 3d audio but recording stereo and then mixing it somewhere into your sphere it's maybe not you

16:39 Luke F. Walton I like that. I like that. And it is kind of an interesting mentality shift because mixing stereo to me feels like you're looking from the conductor's point of view on stage.

16:49 Luke F. Walton pitch you know it's kind of everything is in between here and here or like looking at you're in the third row watching a concert so it's all happening in front of you and there's some spread but a lot of it is kind of melding together and then i love the idea of recording at point of source from that ambasonic perspective so um Before we get into that,

17:10 Luke F. Walton because let's get into that, I want to talk about some competitors because I know that Dolby Atmos has kind

17:13 Martin Rieger Oh, of sure,

17:14 Luke F. Walton taken

17:14 Martin Rieger please.

17:14 Luke F. Walton a lot of the air out of the room.

17:15 Martin Rieger Oh, yeah.

17:17 Luke F. Walton We were talking Sennheiser. I think that Sony's got their own kind of version of object-based audio. Could you just kind of give me the lay of the land and maybe help me find some stuff that I might be missing out there?

17:29 Martin Rieger exactly maybe let's have a look at dolby first like

17:31 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

17:31 Martin Rieger where did

17:32 Luke F. Walton sure.

17:32 Martin Rieger they come from and do they come from films i mean we all know that if you go to a cinema there are loudspeakers on the ceiling and there's this dolby atmos play they are licensed they do a really good job of making it happen inside of cinema so they were like oh we should use this format and make it a thing for music production yeah this is why the setup is as it is where i'm like yeah i would have done things differently but that's another topic

17:56 Martin Rieger And that's despite also doesn't really transport on headphones as good because it was supposed to be played at huge cinema screening rooms. So this is where they come from. Then there is this competitor called MPEG-H. Unfortunately not as doesn't sound as nice as Dolby Atmos.

18:12 Martin Rieger Everybody knows what it is really like MPEG-H 3D audio, which is the German invention obviously from Fraunhofer Institute who invented MP3 for example. So they also have... i have a huge knowledge about

18:24 Luke F. Walton Right?

18:24 Martin Rieger what makes synths sound acoustically and you can now use the tools for free they have something called a i think mpeg age authoring suite or mpeg age production tool or something like that where you can just download the free tools and there you can mix object-based audio and i wrote a very long article on which is the better format and long story short mpeg age there was like this competition for a broadcast like i think the brazilian broadcaster they had

18:51 Martin Rieger They had like an announcement, hey, we are looking for the next generation audio thing, which

18:55 Luke F. Walton Cool.

18:55 Martin Rieger is of next generation audio is literally the term also for this object based and

18:59 Luke F. Walton Okay.

18:59 Martin Rieger whatnot. And

18:59 Luke F. Walton Next

18:59 Martin Rieger there

19:00 Luke F. Walton gen.

19:00 Martin Rieger were 24, I think, criteria and Dolby managed to get two and MPEG-H did all of them.

19:07 Luke F. Walton Wow.

19:08 Martin Rieger So there's so much power under it, especially not only the 3D audio aspect, but also what I find interesting the interactivity. Imagine you're watching, I don't know. No, a Super Bowl, right?

19:19 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

19:19 Martin Rieger And

19:20 Luke F. Walton sure.

19:20 Martin Rieger then you can just mute the commentator because you're annoyed of the commentator. Currently, you can just raise the volume for the whole mix,

19:29 Luke F. Walton Yes.

19:29 Martin Rieger but you can't really adjust any sources. And this is what object-based audio can do. You can adjust the objects if the broadcaster gives you the possibility. And Dolby doesn't support that despite they claim we can also do that, but they cannot. But MPEG-H.

19:45 Martin Rieger which can do that and this is already happening in korea right now as i mentioned brazil so i see it in a in a way of a broadcast because that has way more advantages they're not focusing on cinemas because this is where they'll be made a good job i guess

19:59 Luke F. Walton right and i like the idea too because i can see that with music where say for example you release a new song and you have like an app and people could turn on and off different stems like you can do that right now with um

20:13 Martin Rieger like we've done web-based versions of that but those are stems instead Yeah, of being able to like give the user the ability to like remix the audio in real time or want to move the guitar do manipulate it and participate with it or jam with it you know they want to lay down a new drum drum take or something like that or but they want to keep this percussion part and i don't know now you could you could dial all that up and that'd be a really fun thing to share with fans because if you want to manipulate music

20:40 Martin Rieger music i've got i've got no problem why with is that you know this not a thing because

20:43 Martin Rieger yeah the technology i love it is already there and everybody mixing a dolby atmos with their objects but no we we don't really want to have that imagine for for djs how cool it would be that you could just take the drums of any song for example and whatnot i would love to hear if this is just like since we're musicians like if this is something we would want or is this something that consumers would also appreciate i'm not sure about that but

21:06 Martin Rieger But I'm not sure if you knew Apple Music has this feature where you can lower the volume of the vocals.

21:13 Martin Rieger Oh, I just tested this. I was like, oh my God, it's happening. But they are not using object-based audio. They are using AI to somehow remove the vocals or make it louder that you have like a karaoke version.

21:25 Martin Rieger Yeah, yeah, yeah. It seems like consumers would also appreciate object-based audio, right?

21:29 Martin Rieger I like that. Especially like, I mean. what i remember i uh when i was learning guitar i bought the the um line six had this like usb interface thing uh but what they did is they had to re-record all these songs so then you could mute different tracks so you could play guitar on them what if it was just the actual song you know it would have saved all this time and money and then i would have been playing with the actual thing instead of um you know session musicians was still great um the craziest thing was that the bunch of the people that worked on that ended up meeting

22:00 Martin Rieger So it's like, hey, I learned guitar playing to your drums, Greg Bissonette. Crazy stuff. But

22:05 Martin Rieger No. the opportunity there, especially for music education and music learning, that seems just off the charts and actionable and just ready to go.

22:15 Martin Rieger Exactly. And I think what could even fire this thing up, Yeah. obviously object-based audio would be the way to go. But as we know, like who is using that right now? Not too many people, but you probably know already those AI tools, which do the same thing basically. So I see this becoming a thing more and more and as I say, there are endless possibilities how to use that.

22:37 Martin Rieger Yeah, the AI stuff is good. It helps and I've used it and I've actually so I did a remake.

22:42 Martin Rieger remix for a band called chai and it's called the miracle remix and um i used the um stem ripper stuff uh because they didn't give me stems and i wanted to get started and then they just never gave me stems so i was like whatever i'm just and then eventually i got a vocal so i sub i subbed out the artifact vocal for the real thing but there's just a there was a crazy sense of like this audio does not

23:06 Martin Rieger actually exists because it was ripped out of this thing using artificial intelligence so it has all these cracks around the edges in the same way that like if you ripped something out of a painting and said oh this was never in a painting it looks and feels like that and that that ends up having its own cool vibe and so i've been using that in production now because it's it's

23:24 Martin Rieger Hmm. bad it's like the same thing i love um down down grading down sampling mp3s and then re-importing that like i have this song called 1101 and a bunch of it it's basically like i try and turn something into a potato by um doing the lowest quality mp3 over and over and over again and then re-importing it so you can switch in between different types of hi-fi and lo-fi um so i like the artifacty weirdness of those things but to be able to have a

23:49 Martin Rieger real non like lossless version is And tantalizing it will. and it's like why why do you need all the fancy math when you can literally just have object on object off full risk you know just to like inflate your stock price by saying AI probably but Yeah,

24:10 Martin Rieger It's that's interesting. true. So for this, I was just looking it up, the MPEG-H just got included into Pro Tools Ultimate.

24:18 Martin Rieger Oh, yes, exactly. So that's Yeah. a big deal. I'll have to definitely do some learning into that. For cross-compatibility, I know that Atmos, you have to kind of go through the renderer. That's gotten easier in Pro Tools and Logic and stuff. um but for for these different types of object-based um are they cross-compatible like could could i be able to mix in this and then upload it to apple music for example depends

24:46 Martin Rieger Uh, it depends and honestly if I answer now my answer will probably be outdated in a few months because like change it's happening so quick as I mentioned I totally forgot it's not in Pro Tools um

24:57 Martin Rieger yeah yeah it's interesting I think unfortunately as of right now not too much compatibility but there's like this like this audio definition model which is also becoming a thing as a container format that you that somehow remembers where your objects are but

25:13 Martin Rieger Cool. I guess this is not really what Dolby wants because Yeah, they right. want yeah they

25:18 Martin Rieger So should they have want the to own Dolby it. tool and Yeah. it's honestly I've hardly ever used Dolby because I'm it's like I'm I'm trapped I can't really get out of it if I say oh I want to add for example example head tracking for headphones

25:31 Martin Rieger Yeah, or something right, like that right. that it would need a different approach here but i can't do that i can export it i don't know to first order ambisonic which is like a very down mixed version where i'm like hey you know where my objects are give it give them to me but they just won't do that so uh i'm afraid this is not a thing um since since you're mentioning mpeg age and the competitor for dolby atmos music it's sony's 360 fixed reality this

25:57 Martin Rieger Yes. is what you uh just I saw mentioned that uh at the NAMM show. Yeah. and they honestly it's the same same but different it sounds a little bit different it has a different renderer it sort of does the same thing and i mean it's based on mpeg h by the way it's it's more a more specific version as you wish focused on music production so

26:17 Martin Rieger Yeah. which is good but i already did some research and like there are for for every sorry 360 reality song there are four dolby atmos songs so um you can see the the gap is already growing which which is a shame i mean for something like that competition is good but on the other hand a standard is also good so yeah exactly

26:38 Martin Rieger and i think it's interesting because it's been compared to like beta max and vhs you know um but the the difference here is that this is all just

26:46 Martin Rieger you know transmitted virtually so there's no like physical product so i feel like being able to change um platforms or change uh algorithms is there's less barrier than it would be for like you need a physical player to play a physical tape in your physical house it's like these things could change really quickly and so yeah while there may be a lead right now

27:11 Martin Rieger If, you know, if something's better and gets more widely adopted or if there is like a killer app that says, hey, we can't even use Atmos because that's bad technology and the killer app uses this technology, I feel like the tides could change really, really, really fast in this respect.

27:31 Luke F. Walton What's good, guys? Scoobert Doobert here for the love music more podcast and I want to let you in on a little secret. One of my favorite new things, Minuendo lossless earplugs. So these are really, really, really cool. I've got two of them here.

27:45 Martin Rieger It comes in this awesome sweet box, but it comes with a bunch of little goodies like carrying case, tether, cleaning tools, but the real tech is in these little tiny lossless earplugs. My favorite thing about it is, one, you can swap out any of the included tips. So depending on the size of your ear canal, we're all built different. You can get a nice, comfortable fit.

28:07 Martin Rieger But there's also this little lever on these adjustable versions that can go from 7 to 25 decibels of cutting. So depending on if you're listening to new metal or jazz, you can just hit the little lever and adjust in real time. And I think that's really, really cool. You know, for the longest time, I was listening in those awful foam earplugs and it makes the music sound like that. It just.

28:26 Martin Rieger that it just cuts off all of those high frequencies. And so I was always tempted to sneak them out a little bit. Oh, it's my favorite song, no earplugs. And then you get hearing damage, you have tinnitus after the show and then you come back, you want to work in the studio and guess what? Your ears aren't right. And that's why I love Minuendo because you can just pop these in and have full, full, full fidelity with these lossless earplugs.

28:48 Martin Rieger They're two different versions. One is adjustable with a little lever and then this one is fixed.

28:52 Luke F. Walton That's 17 decibels. So check out minuetdo.com where you can search them on Amazon and find minuetdo earplugs today. Get cracking.

29:05 Luke F. Walton Because Betamax and VHS required physical tapes and a physical player in your physical home, you kind of got locked into the dominant kind of platform.

29:19 Martin Rieger And because this is all digital, I could see that if you have a killer app that it could change the tides really, really quickly. And that's why I want to talk about the Vision Pro and

29:30 Martin Rieger Oh like what you're seeing on it, because I feel like it's primarily a developer based tool. That's at least the price point and the things that I'm reading about it are kind of like. Apple made this cool thing.

29:42 Martin Rieger Now someone figure out how to make it work and popular, you know, like, like, please developers make a killer app so that people want to buy this thing. What's been your experience with it so far? What do you think of it?

29:53 Martin Rieger Yeah. First thing, it isn't sold in Germany yet. I Really? know a few Here! friends who are testing it right now because somebody

30:00 Martin Rieger Oh managed my gosh. to get it from the US to Germany and everybody's now watching it. I'm not part, but I wanted to do this with you.

30:06 Martin Rieger Yes, yes, yes. I mean, it will still be here in Yeah. a few months. Great. But honestly, it's more, I'm not sure if the question, where's the killer app, is the right question. It's more like what... What does it do with every other competitor? Because as of right now, there was HTC and Meta, obviously with their Metaverse. So for eight years, I've been hearing, okay, next year, the new Apple VR headset is coming.

30:34 Martin Rieger And I was like, yeah, I believe it when I see it. And now it's finally there. So Meta and like every competitor is under huge pressure. Because as you can tell, the device is like...

30:45 Martin Rieger like sick it's a they had so many patterns in there and so like a huge a bunch of technology that has not really been there yet also regarding sound super interesting developments they managed to solve a few issues that i just mentioned with like down mixing it everything to stereo and whatnot so they really made a good job but as you can tell for me this is a developer device everybody

31:11 Martin Rieger he wants to have it but there isn't really a demand for anything like Yes. the only thing you can really do right now is watch those 2d uh uh screens where i'm like yeah but what do we do with that but this is where it can get interesting with sound i mean you can only see what's in front of you but you can hear what's behind you and this is where it gets interesting and adobe obviously also says hey we have content for the apple vision pro and i'm like yeah but that

31:38 Martin Rieger That's not how it works because

31:39 Luke F. Walton Mmm.

31:40 Martin Rieger where Dolby originates is watching to the front and you have speakers around you but you're not supposed to watch around because you're

31:49 Martin Rieger Mm-hmm. supposed to watch a movie for example but with 360 videos this is what makes sense to introduce head tracking which is already built into AirPods so that you would watch around and then there's the next step which is now does the spatial computing that you can actually move to audio audio objects

32:05 Martin Rieger Yeah, or yeah. get further away from them so you notice from unity that there's like a fall off curve if you go away it gets quieter and this is what dolby atmos does not support and this is where it gets interesting because this is still a very nice use case for 3d audio because you're literally in a 3d space

32:25 Martin Rieger I love it. And it brings me back to an art installation that I saw, I think it was at the Broad in Los Angeles Modern Art Museum. And they had a bunch of different screens and each of the screens was a different musician in a different room. And there's a large physical space with some corridors and things like that.

32:43 Martin Rieger And all the musicians are playing a full concert altogether synced, but they all had speakers right next to the screen.

32:51 Martin Rieger that was like you're now in the living room and you hear the musicians in the living room you walk over here now you're in the bathroom it sounds like a bathroom and it was that was a little moment of like a this would be cooler in vr actually like like i'm walking around this physical space and that's pretty cool but if i could just manipulate and fast jump or kind of like like a video game like you're walking around a video game and in every room

33:14 Martin Rieger Exactly.

33:14 Luke F. Walton room there's a different set of musicians all playing the same song like how eerie and immersive could that be where you like because one of the things that i don't think people realize is just the

33:23 Luke F. Walton the the emotional um changes that change in space can have on you like the the feeling of a long hallway that goes on forever or a closed elevator that is really tight and cramped like those those like evolutionary switches are really fun to play with from a game perspective from a movie perspective all these things and the idea of like hearing this the audio source fade off as the um

33:49 Luke F. Walton The elevator or the elevator doors close or something like that. All of that's really tantalizing and unexplored. And I'm.

33:59 Luke F. Walton I'm excited. I'm excited for the potential and I like hearing about atmos and the limitations to be able to pull that emotion out of art. That's

34:07 Martin Rieger yeah

34:08 Luke F. Walton interesting.

34:08 Martin Rieger since we're since you're talking about like music applications i mean um people when they see vr they think oh this is for gaming but now we have a headset which is not which is not really for gaming i mean what gamer would buy a evolution pro to not play any games because there aren't any right um but what What can you do, for example, what I find really interesting is

34:29 Luke F. Walton mm

34:29 Martin Rieger that the

34:29 Luke F. Walton -hmm

34:29 Martin Rieger common mistake with VR is people try to replicate reality like they film a concert and then you can watch it in VR and we're like, now it's a bad copy of the actual concert.

34:39 Luke F. Walton right yeah

34:40 Martin Rieger Imagine a metaverse concert like you have virtual characters, everybody's an avatar. Where would you put loudspeakers? Like nowhere,

34:49 Luke F. Walton yeah

34:49 Martin Rieger there is no point for using loudspeakers. So suddenly we... We could hear with spatial audio, for example, the singer from the stage surrounded by the guitarist with the drums in the back. But you would still be hearing like people shouting just like in a real concert. So you can even break the boundaries of acoustics, for example, since you're in a virtual space.

35:10 Martin Rieger I think this is where it gets interesting, not where we try to replicate reality, but breaking the borders.

35:16 Luke F. Walton I like that. And I like that, I mean, there's a reverb that I really like. Like it's by Zynaptic and it's called Adaptive Verb and the premise is it's a reflectionless reverb so it's not trying to have any amount of early or late reflections or delays it's instead is using synthesizers to kind of like a like a harmonic engine

35:41 Luke F. Walton produce trails that sound like reverb but they just kind of go on and float into the ether into space and it feels incredibly artificial and in a very but in a very musical way because it's all you know like second and third order harmonics that are being amplified

35:57 Luke F. Walton um but the the potential of all this stuff is really cool because like now yeah you can have a recording um that feels and sounds like you're floating around in space with the band instead of sitting at red rocks you know and or you can have the the beauty would be probably the the twist if you could make it feel like you're sitting down at a concert and then all of a sudden the chairs fall out from below you and now you're floating in space you know these little moments of like this is

36:25 Luke F. Walton This is kind of cringe. This is kind of lame. This is expected. This is a weird mimesis of reality to now you break the barriers. And in the same way that animation does, you know, like that's one of the reasons why I like animation so much is that you don't have to think about CGI and effects. You can just get immersed in this like animated world and then it can go wherever they want because the only limit is.

36:47 Luke F. Walton imagination um what if we could do the same thing with audio and i think that audio is what pays it off you know like if you've listened to like a great video with really crappy underscore it just doesn't hit the same you know audio is is the is the thing that makes something real in my

37:04 Martin Rieger exactly

37:04 Luke F. Walton humble opinion

37:04 Martin Rieger i mean you you're in a 3d space it makes so much sense to use 3d audio obviously you could just play back your stereo and look around and see you're the chairs floating away but

37:14 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

37:14 Martin Rieger it won't get you into the space and this is what spatial audio can really give you like the feeling of presence of yourself like your your body in the room but also with i don't know the musicians for example and this again is like the approach of think about the perspective if you want to get started don't just throw audio objects into your scene and then move them around like 8d audio all circling around the head and what you

37:40 Martin Rieger and whatnot but

37:40 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

37:41 Martin Rieger really think of a of a setting that you would want to hear i guess that's that's like that that's that's the way to go and not yeah not everything is mono and then we have mid and center like think of it like yeah mid center mid no what's it called a mid side sorry that's the term usually you put everything into the mid and then a little bit on the side right but now you have mid side side side basically like so many possibilities to place anything

38:08 Luke F. Walton And

38:08 Martin Rieger Yeah,

38:08 Luke F. Walton I love that. And I love the potential too for density. Like one of the things that I like about stereo mixing is that it allows you to do more stuff. Like you can have a little tiny flare that only happens in the back of your right ear. And then all of a sudden it clears up the mix because now if it was in mono, there would be this other weird thing.

38:28 Luke F. Walton It's distracting my ear, but then it's all spread out in stereo. Now I don't mind that there's some little dissonance kind of off to the side. It ends up adding vibe. The idea of now you have a sphere around you, you have all these different dimensions of possibility of like tension, release, simplicity, complexity that.

38:49 Luke F. Walton even the stereo field just doesn't allow you to do and um and i also think that the the music consumer has gotten more used to intense sounds like there's more intense stereo than there was before and even like a lot of my audio old school audio friends hate it because they hear this like oh it's so stereo it's gonna sound so bad in mono it's like nobody cares old man but

39:12 Martin Rieger It's like the mono speaker in go elsewhere. like

39:18 Luke F. Walton but now that we've got to be able to have another one another part of the playground i think the biggest thing is like trying to find the concept that you want to chase and i think that's that's what i'm having fun right here thing is like thinking about like the chair falling out from under you and a different reverb comes into the space or like a adventure through time of like very vintage to very not vintage um could be a you know a fun fun angle compositionally to approach it from and then you execute it using the new tools rather than

39:46 Luke F. Walton than like having the tools fit the composition trying to find a composition that fits the tools like in a in a proactive productive way

39:54 Martin Rieger yeah

39:54 Luke F. Walton that's that's fun

39:55 Martin Rieger like a common misconception especially with dolby it was said that null 3d audio is better than stereo where i'm like hold your horses stereo is still okay i still love stereo all the time like depending on the use case and what apple's approach does and this is really interesting and this is exactly

40:13 Martin Rieger exactly what i'm implementing into my uh experiences that there's not always everything is not always 3d audio for example imagine there's like i don't know um like a voice of god could be determined like a narrator in the scene you wouldn't place the narrator into the scene because then you would localize him with your ears and you would watch him and you're like where's the narrator like is there a ghost or like what's happening

40:39 Martin Rieger thing

40:39 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

40:39 Martin Rieger so this is where it makes sense to have something called in head localization basically

40:44 Luke F. Walton In head localization.

40:44 Martin Rieger you move your head

40:45 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

40:45 Martin Rieger and the voice stays inside your head it's not coming from a 3d space and this is what it's not possible with dolby atmos and this is why i'm always like dolby atmos is not made for head tracking and also for spatial computing because

40:58 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

40:59 Martin Rieger this um it's called what's it called non-diagetic to to throw inside

41:04 Luke F. Walton That's

41:04 Martin Rieger terms

41:04 Luke F. Walton a good word.

41:04 Martin Rieger which is basically be a sound that's not part of the scene but

41:09 Luke F. Walton Okay.

41:09 Martin Rieger it can make sense to add it as an addition for example a bass you can't really localize a bass anyways so why put it into a scene because it would it would just get narrowed down it would lose probably a lot of its punch and since we can't localize it you could make it an in-head localization and use it's something called like a headlock stereo track for example which is yeah then not rotating but it still maintains the

41:34 Martin Rieger it's the punch from a stereo so

41:35 Luke F. Walton Okay.

41:35 Martin Rieger you can still like the way to go for me is to have the best of all the worlds

41:40 Luke F. Walton Mm

41:41 Martin Rieger like best

41:41 Luke F. Walton -hmm.

41:41 Martin Rieger of stereo best

41:42 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

41:43 Martin Rieger of channel-based audio which makes so much sense for reverb for example

41:47 Luke F. Walton Yep.

41:47 Martin Rieger or like recordings you did and then the objects and this is exactly the approach that now apple is implementing for the apple vision pro i think they call it spatial audio ambient audio and A channel, something headlocked audio.

42:00 Martin Rieger I mean, everybody uses different terms, but with Dolby Atmos, for example, you just have objects, you just have the bed, but you don't have this other track that would be very useful for all kinds of immersive mediums.

42:12 Luke F. Walton yeah that's a great point too because that's that is one of the things that i um i find lacking from Atmos mixes is that like not everything i don't not everything wants to fit in that box

42:25 Luke F. Walton like there's there might be a synthesizer that is literally just there to fill like 150 hertz like it is not meant to really even be heard it's just meant to be felt and provide like you know because a lot of times when i'm mixing um i'll be pulling out a lot of like 150 to 250 hertz because it adds all this weight and it's so additive especially with proximity effect you know the closer you are recording to a microphone which you sometimes need to do to get

42:51 Luke F. Walton to get modern vocal sounds these kind of whispery things like the billy eilish kind of things um so you're pulling that pulling out pulling out then eventually you look at your mix and you go oh man like i don't have enough of this thing now because i've been pulling it out of so many tracks and you add back in like a juno to

43:06 Luke F. Walton give it a little bit more heft and then allow all of the vocals and things to be airier and float on top but when i've done object-based i now i localize that juno and i don't want to it's not even supposed to be seen it's supposed to be like the wallpaper the the flooring or something like that the rug goes on top of and so that that's a really great great kind of way of thinking about it is instead you localize it in the head with a bass guitar or something like that and then that creates just this unit

43:32 Luke F. Walton it that foundation that everything else can float

43:34 Martin Rieger exactly

43:34 Luke F. Walton on top of yeah

43:34 Martin Rieger foundation is the word thank you yeah

43:36 Luke F. Walton no problem

43:37 Martin Rieger and then add your objects on top and still it maintains the like the punch that you know from the stereo but also the spatial effect otherwise some songs they are so special that it just falls apart i feel like i mean but also doing this comparison between like stereo and atmosphere a little bit like what's it called apple and And pears, it's a German term,

43:59 Luke F. Walton apples

43:59 Martin Rieger but it's

43:59 Luke F. Walton and pears

43:59 Martin Rieger the German equivalent, it's pears, what is

44:02 Luke F. Walton it's pears

44:03 Martin Rieger it in English?

44:03 Luke F. Walton pears pears

44:04 Martin Rieger Pears,

44:04 Luke F. Walton apples and

44:04 Martin Rieger okay.

44:05 Luke F. Walton oranges i thought you said beer i thought you said beer and i thought that would have been the most german thing ever It's

44:11 Martin Rieger epic

44:11 Luke F. Walton like comparing apples

44:11 Martin Rieger beer

44:12 Luke F. Walton and beer.

44:12 Martin Rieger okay but to get the point across and

44:16 Luke F. Walton Yes, it does.

44:17 Martin Rieger that that's yeah it's the stereo it's the use case it's just a little bit different but this is why i'm always criticizing dolby 3d audio is not necessarily better than stereo it's a different experience and it can help some of the songs but it can also be bad for some of the songs i mean i never really heard a good good metal song because

44:38 Luke F. Walton oh interesting

44:39 Martin Rieger it

44:39 Luke F. Walton yeah

44:39 Martin Rieger just lives from being right into your face and then suddenly you have the guitars and singer in front of you and something around you and i'm like and this roominess which just destroys the this yeah this this this this punch

44:52 Luke F. Walton yeah yeah i like that that's that's a great point and i feel that i feel that for a lot of things and i think that's the reason why a lot of like hip-hop Atmos mixes that i've heard um is so focused on doing the utmost stuff with high-end like high hats

45:06 Martin Rieger Hmm.

45:06 Luke F. Walton and and swirls and you know noise filter stuff because they want to keep the punch they want to keep as much as you can in front of you but you still got to do a little Atmos-y thing so that you know people feel good that they turned on the Atmos version so you you you know

45:21 Luke F. Walton put stuff going over your head or whatever um that's a really interesting point for um exporting to vision pro or to these other formats so how how would you do that to be able to you know preserve like what we're talking about um being able to headlock and i'm assuming that that's using the um mpeg h

45:42 Luke F. Walton format to be able to achieve that how are you actually getting the those ideas those sounds into the

45:47 Martin Rieger yeah oh

45:48 Luke F. Walton headset yeah

45:48 Martin Rieger asking the real question because this is where you are trapped in Dolby Atmos for instance and you just can't really solve that I mean in Dolby Atmos there is this feature like where you can add near mid far off

46:01 Luke F. Walton yeah right right okay

46:02 Martin Rieger render modules to headphones which which makes sense yeah for headphones it works like you can it which is Which is basically the in-head localization. If

46:10 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

46:10 Martin Rieger you switch

46:10 Luke F. Walton okay.

46:10 Martin Rieger something off, it won't apply any artificial spatialization. But as soon as you add head tracking, Apple ignores the metadata from Dolby and changes it back to the position where the subject is. So if you have your bass in front and you have to pan your object somewhere, which is the approach from Dolby. So if it is in the front and even though you switched off the binaural rendering.

46:34 Martin Rieger as soon as you have head tracking it's switched on again so you suddenly have reverb on

46:38 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

46:39 Martin Rieger your bass which

46:39 Luke F. Walton Right.

46:39 Martin Rieger is probably not what you want but and i mean audio engineers are freaking out because of this because suddenly their mix sounds differently and

46:47 Luke F. Walton Of course.

46:48 Martin Rieger from my perspective all the mixes haven't been mixed with head tracking in mind they have been mixed with the intention of please watch to the front and do don't do this right

46:58 Luke F. Walton Right.

46:59 Martin Rieger and this is a problem but But I think Apple went with Dolby because they said, hey, we still need content and

47:06 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

47:07 Martin Rieger we need to make people excited. And if there's no binaural rendering on the base, like who cares, right?

47:12 Luke F. Walton Mm

47:13 Martin Rieger I guess

47:13 Luke F. Walton -hmm.

47:13 Martin Rieger this was the thinking underneath it.

47:15 Luke F. Walton Mm

47:15 Martin Rieger But

47:15 Luke F. Walton -hmm.

47:15 Martin Rieger if you watch to there's now this reality kit, which is like the developer tools for Apple Vision Pro and they have the same approach as I just mentioned with ambient audio channel and audio objects. and this is where you can make it happen just like you want it to be but

47:32 Luke F. Walton Cool.

47:33 Martin Rieger obviously then you would need to build your own app and implement it into a game engine and whatnot so it it's still really a pain to deliver spatial audio although i mentioned hey youtube supports spatial audio but then you would have to upload your file and maybe that's not for your client it doesn't need that you want doesn't want to have it public and it's yeah desensitization That could be better.

47:57 Luke F. Walton That yeah, that's interesting and that that makes sense because it's early technology and it's on the vanguard of stuff So it makes sense that that would be where a lot of the growing pains would be Sorry to interrupt this very important broadcast, but it's time for one more advertisement for myself for this podcast.

48:12 Luke F. Walton What I'm asking for is for you to rate it five stars, to share it with your friends. This is like the most important thing for this podcast to grow. So if you want to do this, you go onto the podcast screen, right? You click on the dot, dot, dot on Spotify. Under there it says rate show and you go and you click it five stars. If you could do that for me, that's the best way for the algorithms and all this stuff.

48:32 Luke F. Walton stuff to share it out with the world i know that it's a lot to ask but if you could please please please just please just hit those three dots on a five star would really help us out and helps us you know get the get the word out and spread the love of music so thank you if you're listening on youtube you know what to do like subscribe all that good stuff thank you so much and here's the rest of the episode i also find it interesting how developers will look at a problem versus audio people will look at a problem where they'll go you know whatever the base is farther away and then the audio people like no

48:59 Luke F. Walton like no we can't have reaver on the bass what are you doing like totally different um views on like the severity of a problem i think that that's always interesting um i mean it's been that same way like like on soundcloud like i've had

49:15 Luke F. Walton problems with like i uploaded and now it sounds like crap because sound soundcloud's algorithms and compression algorithms are just absolutely terrible they've gotten better um but it also invented basically a new form of music which is kind of cool too um but you know it's this give and take of developers got one set of priorities audio people have got another set of priorities and um they should get more on the same page yeah

49:36 Martin Rieger exactly so the the unsatisfying answer with everything regarding immersive audio is always it depends like

49:43 Luke F. Walton Yes. Yeah.

49:43 Martin Rieger like what's if you can mix in Dolby Atmos and upload to Apple Music feel free to do that but if you do something else there's always like some workarounds to do this is why I do more and more coaching I mean obviously if you google for 3d audio chances are you end you end up on my page somehow and

50:02 Luke F. Walton Cool.

50:02 Martin Rieger i now have like a like a like a video course with

50:05 Luke F. Walton Love

50:05 Martin Rieger where

50:06 Luke F. Walton it.

50:06 Martin Rieger i have to um how to say like i booked basically all other audio engineers because

50:11 Luke F. Walton Right.

50:12 Martin Rieger there's so many things like regarding 3d audio oh like how do you use the reverb how do you the space the the objects how do you even use the microphones we haven't we haven't even talked about that today but as you can tell it's a huge topic how do you do the master mastering and whatnot so

50:28 Luke F. Walton Yes.

50:28 Martin Rieger i really try to build something that's that helps everybody i guess and for me it's also still a learning process and i think as of right now we can still learn a lot from each other right

50:38 Luke F. Walton Yeah, totally. And I know so much of the medium will be what we make of it. And I love that. Yeah, it's an endless topic. It's crazy. That was part of the reason why I was trying to keep it as overview as possible is yeah, like, I've done the mastering on Atmos and it's it's confusing as hell to me because it's

50:55 Martin Rieger Yeah.

50:56 Luke F. Walton such a different workflow it's such a different mindset of like you're hitting these loudness targets it's not meant to be as loud you're trying to reserve all these things versus on normal audio mastering it's like let's slam that limiter let's get the gold clipper out let's you know all these different things it is um it's just a different world and a different um goal set i guess like you're trying to preserve things rather than trying to melt

51:20 Luke F. Walton old things i'm not i'm not exactly sure how to put it but that even is it's a big challenge

51:25 Martin Rieger again it's like how much freedom you have from the artist i

51:28 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

51:29 Martin Rieger mean i know studios i like one guy in berlin he already made like 400 mixes of the dolby atmos but he always has to take into account the stereo mix and not be too wild but take what works from the stereo keep it in the stereo and from then maybe put objects around you and see what it does but still always the reference is still the stereo because you don't want to mess with with the labels like

51:52 Martin Rieger Yes. what Yeah. why does it now sound so differently like what what the heck is happening and

51:57 Martin Rieger Great. honestly labels really don't understand most of the time what's happening the artists mostly don't care so this is why i can just recommend try to get involved as early as possible don't just do an up mix try to really build a composition even in 3d and this is where it gets interesting and this is where we get into this record it As it was,

52:19 Luke F. Walton Yes.

52:19 Martin Rieger it just doesn't swear you have this. Yeah, it just everything starts to fit together. But as soon as you separate everything and try to make it artificial, for me, it doesn't really work.

52:29 Luke F. Walton Interesting. So are you talking about using then specific microphones and gear to input the music in order to achieve that?

52:39 Martin Rieger yeah for example i mean there are multiple possibilities of we mentioned a vr mic there

52:44 Luke F. Walton Yes.

52:45 Martin Rieger are another rigs like every i feel like every audio engineer has his secret setup of pointing microphones all over the place i mean most of the time it's it's it's an opt no it's a bad approach i mean the bad and and there'll be atmosphere 7.1.2 so some take this as the approach but some of them also um have i don't know like Like, do you know all RTF 3D,

53:09 Martin Rieger which is basically a cube with four microphone pointing to the bottom and four to the top, and then you convert it into objects. It's from Sharp, so it's a German sounding and manufacturing company. And this is also a thing in broadcasting because it's still pretty small, but huge in its... it's in its sound for example

53:34 Luke F. Walton Cool.

53:34 Martin Rieger and as long as the return it depends on your studio do you do you even want to record the sound of your studio i mean they're like every road studio you

53:43 Luke F. Walton Right.

53:43 Martin Rieger you would be thinking hey that's the sound i want to have but random studio in i don't know

53:48 Luke F. Walton Here.

53:48 Martin Rieger where do

53:49 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

53:49 Martin Rieger i want to have it spatial probably

53:51 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

53:51 Martin Rieger not

53:51 Luke F. Walton Right. Well, and have you found anything like so, for example, one of my favorite plugins right now is Universal Audio. um sound city it's like a it's a reverb reamber kind of thing um and basically what that does is the the premise is sound city which doesn't exist anymore you're able to put your audio into it it sounds like it was recorded there it's actually really good

54:11 Martin Rieger Ah.

54:11 Luke F. Walton um it's it's pretty convincing um i don't use it maybe i use a little bit more off label because i usually mix it in like one percent um just to give it that sense of like it's in the place have you found anything that kind of can capture

54:25 Luke F. Walton a little bit of that as though you're using say for example an ir response of that chef's or tf3d or like in a really good room you know that would be the ultimate for me so that i wouldn't necessarily have to buy the four thousand dollar microphone and have a million dollar recording studio instead i can buy you know use my use my little um uad sphere and do a model of it or something you know like um do you see have you seen anything that that um perks you up like that's convincing or that's close

54:52 Luke F. Walton to uh the real

54:53 Martin Rieger i

54:54 Luke F. Walton thing yeah

54:55 Martin Rieger think what we we really would need is as you say like an impulse response of like all the rooms or that you can tweak and honestly this is such a pain still that i do the recordings and i add my objects and it works but as soon as i want to fake another room i have to depend on the reverb presets and have to tweak them and still it doesn't really cut it as soon as you add head tracking you have like multiple parameters that you

55:21 Martin Rieger that you don't really want to mess with i mean if you mix it in stereo i feel it's a bit easier

55:25 Luke F. Walton Yep.

55:25 Martin Rieger to fake a sound like as you mentioned you just mix it in one percent and that's cool but i feel like there's this this trend of um virtualizing your studio like um reference your mix in every red studio or reference your mix and whatnot and i would like to know like what you think about this because are people so in love with their studio which is what i feel If it was perfectly fine,

55:50 Luke F. Walton Mm

55:51 Martin Rieger then no

55:51 Luke F. Walton -hmm.

55:51 Martin Rieger dead studio, so why would I fake another studio? I mean, we do the car check, we do the, I don't know, headphone check, but isn't mixing in another studio more confusing than helpful,

56:02 Luke F. Walton Yes.

56:02 Martin Rieger or what do you think I about that?

56:03 Luke F. Walton think it's all just hype. Like my, yeah,

56:06 Martin Rieger There

56:06 Luke F. Walton I think it's completely worthless. Like less than worthless actually is my personal

56:11 Martin Rieger Because of

56:11 Luke F. Walton opinion.

56:11 Martin Rieger that reason,

56:12 Luke F. Walton Like

56:12 Martin Rieger or?

56:12 Luke F. Walton I know what my headphones sound like. I know what my speakers sound like.

56:16 Martin Rieger Yeah.

56:16 Luke F. Walton I've, you know, I can mix. I have mixed. I have mixed stuff in these headphones that have played in movie theaters and they never touch speakers during the mixing process of the check-in speakers and stuff. But I know what these are going to sound like versus a full-on movie theater. Why do I need Abbey Road to tell me what my headphones sound like? I know the pros and weaknesses. I know the dips.

56:40 Luke F. Walton I have that internalized. If you work in your studio enough, you know it. You just have to trust your gut. I think that... I think it's just people falling in love with the hype and thinking like, oh, I can, even the sonar work stuff that supposedly makes your perfect flat even response. It's like, just do the math in your own head, you know, be your own sonar works. There's

56:59 Martin Rieger Yeah.

56:59 Luke F. Walton no reason why you can't. I think that all of this is just like technology in search of a problem.

57:05 Martin Rieger but guess what i'm a huge fan of sonarworks

57:07 Luke F. Walton Cool.

57:07 Martin Rieger actually

57:07 Luke F. Walton Cool. Yeah.

57:08 Martin Rieger uh like for for um for headphones because it it's just like

57:12 Luke F. Walton Yes.

57:12 Martin Rieger i have two pairs of headphones and now they sound the same because

57:14 Luke F. Walton That makes sense.

57:15 Martin Rieger you

57:15 Luke F. Walton I get that.

57:15 Martin Rieger have

57:15 Luke F. Walton I like

57:15 Martin Rieger a headphone especially

57:16 Luke F. Walton that. Yep.

57:16 Martin Rieger like

57:16 Luke F. Walton I get that.

57:17 Martin Rieger binaural audio you have like different hrtfs and whatnot

57:20 Luke F. Walton Okay.

57:20 Martin Rieger like

57:20 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

57:20 Martin Rieger so many textures so this helps and also for the lots because i was surprised like how easy it was to

57:27 Luke F. Walton Cool.

57:27 Martin Rieger set up and like how i feel like my room is good and my speakers are but they have like two with a frequency curve and it just canceled out everything

57:36 Luke F. Walton that's cool that's cool right

57:37 Martin Rieger but then adding back the every

57:39 Luke F. Walton every

57:39 Martin Rieger noise to this

57:40 Luke F. Walton okay

57:40 Martin Rieger mix doesn't really make sense okay i think that's

57:42 Luke F. Walton i

57:42 Martin Rieger that's cool okay

57:43 Luke F. Walton get that i get that especially if you identify like a very specific problem like okay i've got like a 250 hertz hum in my room or whatever here i'm gonna knock that out of the speakers i get that totally get that but like i also don't think

57:53 Luke F. Walton i think that you can i think you can back solve a lot of that those things just in your head maybe it's not ideal and especially yeah if you're moving between different headphones i could totally get that too um but like if you know your rig you know your rig there's like you know ns10s and all of these things that people have used forever they have their pros they have their weaknesses but the pro

58:11 Martin Rieger Exactly.

58:12 Luke F. Walton the strength is that the engineer knows what they sound like and how that'll translate to other things So

58:17 Martin Rieger Yeah,

58:17 Luke F. Walton if you know your stuff.

58:18 Martin Rieger the only thing that convinced me, I do know the Smith Realizer.

58:25 Luke F. Walton What

58:25 Martin Rieger It's

58:25 Luke F. Walton does that one?

58:25 Martin Rieger like a... oh god. Okay, like imagine you're traveling.

58:29 Luke F. Walton Yes.

58:29 Martin Rieger This is where it can make sense to not only use your headphones,

58:33 Luke F. Walton Yes.

58:33 Martin Rieger but also to have this virtualization.

58:35 Luke F. Walton Cool.

58:35 Martin Rieger But how does Sonarworks know how your room sounds like? It doesn't really work that way. So yeah, Smith realized that it's basically like also a piece of hardware and it comes with headphones that you put into your ear because there are microphones there. So it does the sweep. It measures your room. boom with your head

58:53 Luke F. Walton Okay,

58:53 Martin Rieger and

58:54 Luke F. Walton that's

58:54 Martin Rieger out

58:54 Luke F. Walton cool.

58:54 Martin Rieger comes there's a webcam and this works so

58:56 Luke F. Walton Cool.

58:57 Martin Rieger this this really convinced me of okay because i was so freaking out like you you play back the music oh it's still coming from the speakers because it it sounds like from the speakers and you put away your headphones and you sit in a silent room and i like oh oh

59:12 Luke F. Walton Cool.

59:13 Martin Rieger it

59:13 Luke F. Walton Cool.

59:13 Martin Rieger works it

59:14 Luke F. Walton I love

59:14 Martin Rieger works

59:14 Luke F. Walton that.

59:15 Martin Rieger so i know a guy who's using that for traveling to have to have the sound of his studio on headphones and this is a legit use case for me but everything sitting yourself in different studios not sure about that but i think we agree same

59:27 Luke F. Walton yeah yeah i think we agree on that one and i'm sure uh plenty of other people disagree and i know i like whatever helps your process and your mixes go forth um no shade that's just my personal opinion um i'm uh i i i've loved this conversation i'm really curious about you know the future developments i can see all these things it's like i wish this existed

59:45 Luke F. Walton existed so maybe that means i should start a company um but but like i hopefully these things come around so that we don't have to and we can we can instead use the tools instead to have to build the tools but um it's a really exciting time i i want to i want to end with one last question so the show is called love music more the goal is to make people come out the other end of this episode and love music a little bit more um i always end it with love music why so this is the question to you why do you love this why are you excited about

60:13 Luke F. Walton about this technology, about learning, about growing, about pushing the frontiers, and why are you giving so much of your life to audio and music? What inspires you?

60:23 Martin Rieger Wow, big question.

60:24 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

60:25 Martin Rieger I

60:25 Luke F. Walton totally.

60:25 Martin Rieger try

60:25 Luke F. Walton Take it wherever you want to go.

60:26 Martin Rieger to try to do a small answer. I mean, for me, it's just like the moment of playing back even your own stuff and I'm like, oh yeah, this inspires not yourself, but also other people and you can listen to it over and over and over again. And for me, it's the mixture of the technology and the creativity.

60:50 Martin Rieger what's the point of having like the Apple Vision Pro if you don't have something fun to watch or something useful even and for me it's trying to find the sweet spot so this is exactly why I do more and more consultancy work for for any project where I can really decide like what people experience and I think this is where it gets interesting when the sound guy suddenly has to tell a little bit more than usually usually I just get a final product and

61:17 Martin Rieger and they're like yeah now throw your sound on it but if we do it the other way around i think this is where we unlock a whole new um a set of possibilities and that's yeah we just haven't been done hasn't been done before and i'm just excited to every new piece of headphone or like any piece of vr headset that's coming out but i'm still like yeah but what do people listen to and i feel like i should be the guy that does something cool with it i don't know but

61:44 Martin Rieger But obviously you guys also should do something with that. I can't do all the work by myself, so I can just encourage to do something and start small, start to find out what works with 3D audio, which wouldn't have worked with stereo. This is currently the approach I take. Everything that works in stereo for me is not interesting. But as I mentioned, hey, let's do the podcast as a 360 video.

62:08 Martin Rieger That doesn't make much sense, but we can do it. Maybe this is... this is something that we can learn from and yeah I'm also still learning and so start learning I guess I hope that's that's a nice answer

62:19 Luke F. Walton It is a great answer. It is. It's awesome. And I totally, I totally vibe with that.

62:23 Luke F. Walton I mean, I think that that that's that's when people can stay relevant can stay in it can stay young can stay on the vanguard is when you keep that energy you know i think that the people that that slip into like this is the way i've always done it this is the way i always will do it that's when the kind of world just starts to pass you by now you're like a lounge act a vintage act um staying staying on staying on this tip that that's where um

62:50 Luke F. Walton That's where the creative juices are. That's where the muses want you to go. So, one,

62:54 Martin Rieger Maybe one last thought on that.

62:55 Luke F. Walton please.

62:56 Martin Rieger What I see most of the time now with Dolby Atmos again,

62:59 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

62:59 Martin Rieger like people put loudspeakers up the ceiling and hope for the big jobs to come to them. And that's just not how it works. Because why would suddenly people just pay you more because you have loudspeakers? Honestly,

63:11 Luke F. Walton Great.

63:12 Martin Rieger like that's not how business works. And I would say please don't jump on the bandwagon of...

63:19 Martin Rieger of the Beatles hoping for money to fly in because also that's not the motivation you're probably aiming for because you will just disappoint yourself and you will never make up to your expectations but like the approach I did basically was to find what kind of projects resonate with me and just keep on trying like I did some artsy things that aren't even on my homepage because I'm like yeah I shouldn't tell anybody about it but I learned something which is important

63:47 Martin Rieger important for me um and i i i understood okay this is probably not the way i want to go and this

63:53 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

63:53 Martin Rieger is why i'm not in this dolby atmos music game because it's it's there's so much how do you say like people are hungry for the for the money i feel like and this certainly should not be the approach just do something what makes fun and start with something that that inspires yourself and it's fun for you and i feel like the people who are successful with what they do

64:14 Martin Rieger you that didn't really think about the money they just did what they love to do and this is it's so obvious if you think about it but after years and years and doing this we still feel like oh no there's this new tool and whatnot it's so noisy all the time

64:28 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

64:29 Martin Rieger but

64:29 Luke F. Walton yeah.

64:29 Martin Rieger sometimes just go one step back and think like what what do you really want to do and then just do it I guess oh

64:35 Luke F. Walton Love that. So where can people find you, work with you, hire you? Where should they track

64:40 Martin Rieger yeah good

64:41 Luke F. Walton you?

64:41 Martin Rieger thank you how are we doing this

64:42 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

64:43 Martin Rieger uh um go to vr t oh my god how do i say that in english vr tonung it's a v a v a oh my god v r t o n u n g like um dot de or just honestly just google for 3d audio something and chances are and get my name and martin 3d audio martin i guess it says easier

65:09 Martin Rieger and then you can have a listen to to whatever kind of wild projects i'm doing and also there's i wrote like over 100 articles now on immersive audio and vr sound and and i keep it coming because there's oh there's so much happening in this space and i can't do everything on my own so i would love if people just jump on something very specific and become really good at that because this could also be very useful for me

65:34 Luke F. Walton I love it. I love it. Well, I'll definitely put that in the bio too so people can. click the link and

65:38 Martin Rieger Yeah, sort of.

65:39 Luke F. Walton no i love it i love it no i'd be i'd be doing the same thing in japanese if i was speaking japanese so don't feel bad that's how it goes um thank you everybody for for watching thank you so much martin really really enjoyed this conversation

65:51 Martin Rieger so much fun thanks for having me and for sharing for raising awareness on immersive audio i hope i did a good job and i would love to hear the the comments like what Yes.

66:00 Martin Rieger are you interested in because i always talk to to the void like oh good immersive audience and i hardly get any returns because nobody really understands what the hell i'm doing so i'd love to know like what what your audience is just curious about like what are you wondering um where do you need help just let me know thank you so much for having me it was a Bosso bless. Thank you, Mark.