The BOSKER studio, where I create and mix music in surround sound.
The latest development in sound mixing is the accessibility of immersive audio. Anyone with a phone and a subscription to Apple Music, Amazon Music, or Tidal can now listen to music in surround. How does that work? There’s this old technology / phenomenon of binaural audio. While listening on headphones it tricks you brain into thinking that the stereo track you’re listening to is in fact surround audio. That has been around since the seventies, and works quite simply. Sound has to be recorded with a dummy head and microphones placed inside the ear canals. The two microphones in the head, one in each ear, then record the reflections of the outer ear and the shape of the head, as well as slight time delay between the two ears. When one listens back to that recording on headphones, the brain interprets the information as if the sound is coming from outside the headphones. Et voilà, surround sound. If you don’t have a dummy head, don’t worry, just stick some small microphones in your ears and record that way. I actually experimented with that and it works really well.
Ok, but now you’re probably thinking, how does a whole mix of a song end up in binaural sound if it’s not recorded in that way. The interesting bit is that there are now computer algorithms that simulate the binaural recordings. If a piece of music gets mixed in a surround sound studio, it can now be uploaded to said streaming platforms and your phone plays it back as surround sound on your headphones. Pretty cool.
So far surround sound at home hasn’t been a reality for pretty much everyone, as it’s expensive, needs quite a bit of space, and it needs to be set up properly in order for it to work. There’s no more need for that. Just plug in your headphones, and off you go.
How does my BOSKER studio come into this? Well! I set it up as a 7.1.4 surround studio. Just what is needed to create immersive audio mixes. I have had so much fun listening to Dolby Atmos mixes in my studio. Stereo mixes now seem a bit boring to me. :-)
And of course it’s even more fun to mix my own music in surround. I’m glad that you are now able to listen to the surround mixes if you so wish. I’m hopefully able to release new music soon, mixed in surround. Yaaaay!