Sony 360 Reality Audio Explained

US Recording Academy Producers & Engineers Wing posts new Inside the Mix sessions 15/09/23

Just in from the Recording Academy Producers & Engineers Wing...

As a continuation of its "Inside the Mix" online series, the Recording Academy® Producers & Engineers Wing® has posted four sessions spotlighting Sony 360 Reality Audio. The episodes, streamed live for P&E Wing members, featured Sony experts who guided viewers through different aspects of the 360 RA format. Each webinar was introduced by Maureen Droney, Vice President of the Recording Academy Producers & Engineers Wing, and moderated by Michael Romanowski (four-time GRAMMY® Award-winner, including one for Best Immersive Audio Album). The entire series is now archived and available in a playlist here.

The first session, titled "Sony 360 Reality Audio: Formats, Playback, and Studio Requirements," featured Sony's Gus Skinas and Hiro Komuro joining Romanowski for an overview of the technology, background and history behind Sony 360 RA, including format description and reasoning, consumer playback options, and studio requirements.

Second was "Sony 360 Reality Audio: WalkMix Deep Dive, Deliverables & QC," with Skinas, Sony's Bryce Jones and Attila Fodor, who delved into WalkMix Creator, a tool that enables creators to easily produce music in a spherical immersive sound field using the 360 RA format. They also covered deliverables and QC for 360 RA projects.

The third session was "Sony 360 Reality Audio: Deliverables Deep Dive." For this discussion, Skinas, along with Sony's Mike Catandella and Steven Dewey, offered a detailed breakdown of deliverables and related topics to consider when working in the 360 RA format.

The fourth and final session, "Sony 360 Reality Audio: 360 Virtual Mixing Environment," featured Sony's Koyuru Okimoto, Toru Nakagawa and Hiro Komuro breaking down the details and capabilities of the Sony 360 Virtual Mixing Environment (360VME), a technology that uses proprietary measurement technology to accurately reproduce, with headphones, the acoustic field of an immersive audio studio consisting of multiple speakers. After just one measurement in the studio, the optimal environment for immersive audio production can be taken anywhere with headphones and 360VME software.

Maureen Droney remarks, "As part of the P&E Wing's ongoing commitment to providing our industry with the most needed information, we are pleased to present these sessions recorded with experts from Sony. Immersive audio is not merely 'the future' – it is now. These sessions were highly informative, and they offered cutting-edge information directly from the experts that helped develop these tools at Sony. We thank our guests for sharing their expertise, and for guiding viewers through the 360 RA format and how it is used in the world of immersive audio, and we look forward to providing further educational programming for creators as technology continues to evolve."

A previous "Inside the Mix" sub-series focused on Dolby's Atmos® format. That series is available in a playlist at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIMiwsDFHA97NjjngN3nsNXr5fFWAj-tk.