Experts hail 3D audio plug-in by Huddersfield academic 'a game-changer'

Sound engineers can now experience truly immersive 3D audio without the use of loudspeakers but instead through their headphones, following a series of cutting-edge research projects that has been more than five years in the making.

The Applied Psychoacoustics Lab (APL), headed by the University of Huddersfield’s Dr Hyunkook Lee, has developed an immersive audio plug-in titled VIRTUOSO which is being hailed by experts around the world as ‘top-class’, ‘impressive’ and ‘a game-changer’.

“VIRTUOSO is a game-changer for my binaural adventures. Finally, I have a reliable immersive monitoring set-up to go, and all I have to think about is making music for it.”

Hans-Martin Buff, in-house engineer for artists Prince, Scorpions, Peter Gabriel

VIRTUOSO, which recently became available as a commercial product, uses binaural technology powered by ASPEN™, for virtualising stereo or immersive loudspeaker setups and listening rooms for headphone monitoring, ‘with excellent tonal/spatial fidelity and a highly accurate translation’ to real loudspeakers.

While immersive sound technology such as Dolby Atmos can provide listeners with a 3D audio experience, a multi-speaker set-up is required to deliver it.

“This is where the inspiration to develop VIRTUOSO came from,” said Dr Lee. “How do we deliver the same immersive experience to normal listeners when most people today listen to sound with headphones?”

He explained how by using binaural audio technology to simulate the immersive speaker setup and the room acoustics, when you listen to demos of the system it feels like you're in the room listening to actual speakers and not through a set of headphones.

“If you're in a room listening to music, you hear reflections and reverb, not just the sound of the speaker, so there is the overall ambience. When creating the same reality over headphones, this all needs to be simulated and this is done via signal processing methods developed based on our psychoacoustic research findings," he said.

“However, binaural audio rendering can significantly colour the sound negatively if the psychoacoustic aspects of room perception are not considered carefully, and this has been the traditional issue. VIRTUOSO eliminates this problem,” he added.

The technology has been extensively beta-tested by world-leading experts. Bob Katz, mastering and mixing engineer and President of Digital Domain, said: “I thought I was listening to my speakers! VIRTUOSO fooled me. Amazing creation.  We finally have a translation tool that allows mixing with headphones.”

The former in-house engineer for global artists such as Prince, Scorpions & Peter Gabriel, Hans-Martin Buff said: “VIRTUOSO is a game-changer for my binaural adventures. Finally, I have a reliable immersive monitoring set-up to go, and all I have to think about is making music for it.”

Dr Lee is internationally renowned for his expertise in 3D audio recording and reproduction. In 2018 he received the Fellowship Award from the prestigious Audio Engineering Society (AES) after his work in spatial audio psychoacoustics was endorsed by five experts, and the organisation’s board awarded Dr Lee’s work a distinction. He then became the first South Korean in 2021 to be elected Governor of the AES and is extremely proud of this accomplishment.