How the Inventor of the MP3 is Turning Spatial Audio Inside Out

Earlier than Karlheinz Brandenburg revolutionized how we retailer music, he was obsessive about how we understand it. Now, the engineer who compressed your whole music library into pocket-sized recordsdata is increasing sound past the confines of bodily area.

On this planet of audio know-how, few figures loom as massive as Brandenburg, 70. The German mathematician and pc scientist who helped present the world MP3—that tiny file format that will finally upend all the music trade—is now bending sound waves in much more bold methods by way of his newest enterprise, Brandenburg Labs.

Its new crown jewel, Okeanos Professional, may seem like mere headphones to the uninitiated, however they symbolize a significant leap in spatial audio. Priced at €5,000, a relative discount in comparison with the multi-speaker studio setups they’re designed to exchange, the system is powered by Brandenburg‘s proprietary Deep Dive Audio (DDA) know-how to create an phantasm so compelling that customers neglect they’re carrying headphones in any respect.

EDM.com demoed the mind-bending Okeanos Professional system at Austin’s illustrious South by Southwest convention, the place Brandenburg Labs was a finalist for the 2025 SXSW Innovation Awards within the Audio Expertise class. The tech maps your listening area by way of acoustic calibration after which astoundingly tracks your head’s place and rotation in actual time, adjusting the sound subject accordingly with six levels of freedom.

For music producers, this implies the power to position sounds with surgical precision in a digital surroundings, testing mixes throughout totally different speaker configurations with out ever leaving their headphones. The system can course of as much as 16 channels and return immersive binaural audio with latency as little as 10ms, rivaling bodily speaker arrays costing multiples extra.

Its web-based interface offers a seamless management system and all processing occurs on the devoted {hardware}, maintaining your DAW’s CPU meters from having a meltdown. Whereas rivals have tried comparable spatial audio tips, none have fairly but achieved the Brandenburg Labs group’s degree of immersion—maybe unsurprising given the pedigree of its founder.

There is a specific form of magic in making ears consider what they’re listening to—simply ask the person who continues to alter how the world listens. We caught up with Brandenburg to debate the way forward for spatial audio and the way his progressive firm is influencing it.

EDM.com: The MP3 format revolutionized audio by prioritizing accessibility over absolute constancy, a trade-off that sparked many years of debate. With Okeanos Professional, you are now pushing the boundaries of spatial audio precision. How do you reconcile your legacy of compression with this new pursuit of uncompressed, high-fidelity immersion?

Karlheinz Brandenburg: Whereas MP3 was a superb compromise, I’ve labored on increasing audio high quality for many of my life. AAC as utilized by Apple, whereas being much more environment friendly in compression and utilizing comparable fundamental concepts, satisfies even so-called “golden ears.”

25 years in the past, I supervised work on Wave Subject Synthesis. This permits nice immersive audio when you’ve got a room which has dozens of loudspeakers and good acoustics. The issue of attaining the same expertise through headphones had not been solved, till now. Okeanos Professional is the primary headphone system that permits a really life like and lifelike audio expertise.

EDM.com: You’ve got spent your profession democratizing audio know-how. Do you envision a future the place Deep Dive Audio trickles all the way down to consumer-grade headphones, or is that this degree of precision inherently unique to the professional audio area of interest?

Karlheinz Brandenburg: No, it’s not unique to the professional audio area of interest. Our Deep Dive Audio know-how may even be accessible to common shoppers. We’re growing a headphone system that brings immersive audio into each front room. With Okeanos House, anybody can have a simulated high-end multi-speaker system through headphones to get pleasure from music, films or gaming. We plan to launch these headphones in the marketplace finish of 2026.

Within the longer run, we envision a headphone know-how we name PARty, Customized Auditory Actuality. This will probably be a game-changer for all of us, doing for our ears what glasses do for our imaginative and prescient. It should allow AI-supported selective noise cancelling and totally adaptive listening to actual and digital sound sources. We estimate that these headphones will probably be offered in eight-digit numbers, making them accessible and inexpensive for everybody. Immersive audio is only one characteristic of those headphones.

EDM.com: The MP3 format basically modified not solely how we devour music, but in addition the music trade’s whole enterprise mannequin. Do you see Okeanos Professional’s know-how having the same disruptive potential for music manufacturing and consumption?

Karlheinz Brandenburg: MP3 freed music from the provider medium and made it accessible all over the place. The standard and established distribution channels for music have thus been turned the other way up.

Okeanos Professional has disruptive potential by way of sound high quality. It simplifies the manufacturing of immersive sound by making conventional and infrequently very costly speaker setups superfluous. This will increase the possibility that 3D sound will lastly catch on, providing quite a few alternatives for all the leisure trade. Furthermore, spatial audio allows audio augmented actuality, which can undoubtedly be a game-changer.

EDM.com: Deep Dive Audio’s 6DoF head-tracking and room calibration promise a hyper-realistic loudspeaker simulation, however some engineers argue that binaural audio—regardless of how superior—can by no means totally replicate the tactile and psychoacoustic expertise of bodily audio system. What is the one limitation of headphone-based spatial audio that retains you up at night time, and the way shut do you suppose Okeanos Professional will get to bridging that hole?

Karlheinz Brandenburg: It’s unavoidable that some tactile suggestions, like the sensation of low frequencies vibrating the entire physique at a stay live performance, shouldn’t be reproducible with binaural audio over headphones. Audio system are an amazing know-how to attain that. Nevertheless, the true potential of binaural audio lies within the purposes which speaker programs can’t simply obtain.

Binaural audio allows us to simulate arbitrary acoustic scenes, which aren’t restricted by any speaker association. Even at present, it manages to let folks neglect they’re carrying headphones when arrange appropriately. The massive problem we’re now attempting to resolve is to verify this works mechanically for everybody and all over the place, with only a pair of headphones and no particular information required by the consumer.

EDM.com: The professional audio market is notoriously conservative and engineers typically persist with trusted manufacturers for many years. How do you intend to persuade skeptical studio veterans to ditch their monitor setups for a headphone-based system like Okeanos Professional, particularly when it challenges many years of ingrained workflow habits?

Karlheinz Brandenburg: All disruptive applied sciences initially set off skepticism. Our declare is: “You need to hear it to consider it.” And certainly, everybody who tries our system says: “There’s by no means been something prefer it.”

The largest benefit of Okeanos Professional is that it lets you combine multi-channel audio in any studio with unparalleled flexibility, because of its independence from bodily audio system and room configurations. To speak this, we exhibit at quite a few occasions, commerce festivals or exhibitions worldwide and keep shut contact with music producers.

Initially, our system was only a proof-of-concept—we did not plan to promote it. Nevertheless, at commerce exhibits and exhibitions we’ve got been requested a number of occasions by audio engineers and producers to launch our early-stage know-how as a product. This grew to become Okeanos Professional.

Okeanos Professional is a instrument that may enhance and modernize workflows. Finally, engineers will determine the right way to use it. Veterans with a world-renowned, legendary studio setup and perfected workflow may selected to solely complement their workflow, as an example when working from house or demonstrating the results of their work at a unique place. For others, Okeanos Professional might function a viable different for a full multi-speaker system and even as their solely gateway to immersive mixing.

EDM.com: Brandenburg Labs is getting into an area the place immersive audio codecs like Dolby Atmos and Sony 360 Actuality Audio are battling for dominance. How does Okeanos Professional place itself on this format warfare: as a impartial instrument agnostic to requirements, or as a champion of a particular workflow?

Karlheinz Brandenburg: Okeanos Professional does not require or favor any format. Customers can configure their digital speaker system nevertheless they like, regardless of if it is without doubt one of the two massive names, an rising format or perhaps a loopy speaker setup that the producer needs to experiment with. Okeanos Professional can simulate it. Even higher, Okeanos Professional permits producers to modify between speaker configurations with just some clicks, providing unmatched flexibility and compatibility.

EDM.com: At €5,000, the system undercuts a full 16-channel speaker setup, but it surely’s nonetheless a major funding in a crowded headphone market the place rivals supply high-end choices at lower cost factors. What’s your technique to justify that premium to cost-conscious producers who may see spatial audio as a “nice-to-have” somewhat than a must have?

Karlheinz Brandenburg: Okeanos Professional affords a brand new method to mixing through headphones. A key good thing about the system is that it simulates a speaker system inside the producer’s studio, a well-recognized surroundings. For a lot of professionals, this can be a must-have characteristic. The costs to match to are usually not commonplace headphones as a result of they cannot reproduce immersive audio in the way in which ours do. The purpose of comparability is a multichannel loudspeaker system in an acoustically handled room. Once we exhibit our system and speak to potential prospects, all of the professionals inform us that it’s moderately priced.

At this stage, spatial audio continues to be an rising know-how. Each producers and prospects are nonetheless studying the probabilities, limitations and the enchantment of the know-how, and I’m certain the market will preserve evolving.

There have been additionally doubts in regards to the introduction of stereo. George Harrison from the Beatles additionally questioned why two audio system had been wanted again then. Over time, stereo sound caught on and have become the usual. What I am attempting to say is that we’re dealing with a brand new paradigm shift that may take time for music creators to simply accept.

The event can be strongly linked to demand. The extra 3D audio is used, the extra music producers will soar on the bandwagon. Our headphone system can speed up this course of proper now. I believe the patron marketplace for spatial audio programs presently doesn’t supply a passable resolution for everybody. Bridging this hole will probably be a key consider figuring out whether or not the present wave of spatial audio continues.