Earlier than Karlheinz Brandenburg revolutionized how we retailer music, he was obsessive about how we understand it. Now, the engineer who compressed your complete music library into pocket-sized recordsdata is now increasing sound past the confines of bodily area.
On the planet of audio expertise, few figures loom as giant as Brandenburg. The German mathematician and laptop scientist who helped present the world MP3—that tiny file format that will ultimately upend your entire music business—is now bending sound waves in much more bold methods by means of his newest enterprise, Brandenburg Labs.
Its new crown jewel, Okeanos Professional, may seem like mere headphones to the uninitiated, however they characterize a serious leap in spatial audio. Priced at €5,000, a relative cut price in comparison with the multi-speaker studio setups they’re designed to exchange, the system is powered by their proprietary Deep Dive Audio (DDA) expertise to create an phantasm so compelling that customers overlook they’re sporting 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 means 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 flexibility to position sounds with surgical precision in a digital atmosphere, testing mixes throughout completely different speaker configurations with out ever leaving their headphones. The system can course of as much as 16 channels of audio and obtain 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}, holding your DAW’s CPU meters from having a meltdown. Whereas rivals have tried related spatial audio methods, none have fairly but achieved the Brandenburg group’s degree of immersion—maybe unsurprising given the founder’s pedigree.
There is a explicit sort 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 revolutionary firm is influencing it.
EDM.com: The MP3 format revolutionized audio by prioritizing accessibility over absolute constancy, a trade-off that sparked a long time 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 related primary concepts, satisfies even so-called “golden ears.”
25 years in the past, I supervised work on Wave Area Synthesis. This permits nice immersive audio when you have a room which has dozens of loudspeakers and good acoustics. The issue of attaining an identical expertise through headphones had not been solved, till now. Okeanos Professional is the primary headphone system that permits a very life like and lifelike audio expertise.
EDM.com: You have spent your profession democratizing audio expertise. 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 expertise will even be accessible to basic shoppers. We’re growing a headphone system that brings immersive audio into each lounge. With Okeanos Dwelling, 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 available on the market finish of 2026.
Within the longer run, we envision a headphone expertise we name PARty, Customized Auditory Actuality. This shall 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 shall be bought 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 essentially modified not solely how we eat music, but additionally the music business’s complete enterprise mannequin. Do you see Okeanos Professional’s expertise having an identical disruptive potential for music manufacturing and consumption?
Karlheinz Brandenburg: MP3 freed music from the service medium and made it accessible all over the place. The standard and established distribution channels for music have thus been turned the wrong way up.
Okeanos Professional has disruptive potential when it comes to 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 your entire leisure business. Furthermore, spatial audio allows audio augmented actuality, which is able to 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—irrespective 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 reside live performance, shouldn’t be reproducible with binaural audio over headphones. Audio system are an excellent expertise to attain that. Nonetheless, 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 right now, it manages to let individuals overlook they’re sporting headphones when arrange accurately. The large problem we’re now making an attempt to unravel is to verify this works robotically 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 usually follow 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 a long time of ingrained workflow habits?
Karlheinz Brandenburg: All disruptive applied sciences initially set off skepticism. Our declare is: “You must hear it to consider it.” And certainly, everybody who tries our system says: “There’s by no means been something prefer it.”
The most important benefit of Okeanos Professional is that it lets you combine multi-channel audio in any studio with unparalleled flexibility, due to 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 preserve shut contact with music producers.
Initially, our system was only a proof-of-concept—we did not plan to promote it. Nonetheless, at commerce reveals and exhibitions we have now been requested a number of occasions by audio engineers and producers to launch our early-stage expertise as a product. This grew to become Okeanos Professional.
Okeanos Professional is a device that may enhance and modernize workflows. Finally, engineers will resolve methods to use it. Veterans with a world-renowned, legendary studio setup and perfected workflow may selected to solely complement their workflow, for example when working from house or demonstrating the results of their work at a unique place. For others, Okeanos Professional might function a viable various 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 conflict: as a impartial device agnostic to requirements, or as a champion of a selected workflow?
Karlheinz Brandenburg: Okeanos Professional does not require or favor any format. Customers can configure their digital speaker system nevertheless they like, irrespective of if it is without doubt one of the two huge 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 only a few 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 big 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” moderately than a must have?
Karlheinz Brandenburg: Okeanos Professional gives 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 atmosphere. For a lot of professionals, it is a must-have characteristic. The costs to match to aren’t customary headphones as a result of they cannot reproduce immersive audio in the best way ours do. The purpose of comparability is a multichannel loudspeaker system in an acoustically handled room. Once we exhibit our system and discuss to potential clients, all of the professionals inform us that it’s moderately priced.
At this stage, spatial audio continues to be an rising expertise. Each producers and clients are nonetheless studying the probabilities, limitations and the attraction of the expertise, and I’m positive the market will maintain evolving.
There have been additionally doubts concerning 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 making an attempt to say is that we’re going through a brand new paradigm shift that may take time for music creators to just accept.
The event can also 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 feel the patron marketplace for spatial audio programs at present doesn’t supply a passable resolution for everybody. Bridging this hole shall be a key think about figuring out whether or not the present wave of spatial audio continues.
