In April 2021, L-Acoustics expanded the spatial/immersive sound possibilities for music creators with the launch of the L-ISA Studio software suite. A tool created for sound designers, producers, and mixing engineers, L-ISA Studio makes designing immersive audio mixes — whenever, and wherever — easier and affordable. This is obviously a great strategy for a company that leads the sound reinforcement market and wants to push the transition from standard left/right or left/center/right PA systems towards fully immersive multichannel systems, surrounding the audience.
The problem is, when mixing for object-based audio content, sound designers, producers, and mixing engineers need to be in an environment that features those immersive speakers systems, and allows a correct notion of the final result. That is often not possible for people working on the road, and given the variability of the speaker installations in actual auditoriums and stadiums where the performance will take place over days, weeks or months. The solution that is becoming more frequent is to mix using binaural rendering of the multichannel audio and object metadata directly to headphones.
L-Acoustics decided to further expand the applicability of its L-ISA Studio software by adding unlimited free binaural output capability. The software, compatible with any Mac computer, is available on the L-Acoustics website.
Using the built-in L-ISA Studio binaural engine, musicians, producers or audio engineers can create and monitor spatialized audio content from their laptop, using headphones and optional head tracking. The software accepts up to 96 audio objects and sends 12 audio outputs to any soundcard. And all binaural capabilities within L-ISA Studio are free for an unlimited time.
"With platforms like Apple Music, Tidal, or Amazon Music enabling spatial sound, the ability to conceive music directly in immersive is not a luxury; it’s a need," explains Guillaume Le Nost, Executive Director of Creative Technologies at L-Acoustics. "For this reason, we felt that it was important to make L-ISA Studio available to anyone, with any Digital Audio Workstation on the market. L-ISA Studio is an amazing platform from which users can explore spatial audio dimensions and share ideas with other creators."
In the paid version of the software, mixing engineers and creators can deploy L-ISA Studio in any multichannel mixing or recording studio with up to 12 loudspeakers for true multichannel monitoring. This allows pre-production to be done with the L-ISA Studio software suite for live productions, then seamlessly transferred to a venue configuration using the L-ISA Processor.
The L-ISA Studio software seamlessly interfaces with leading digital audio workstations, show control software, and gaming engines. It also offers compatibility with various immersive/spatial/3D audio formats, including Dolby Atmos and other multichannel configurations.
First introduced in 2016, L-ISA technology is L-Acoustics fully integrated solution to design, process, mix, and experience multichannel sound for live performances. L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound technology combines L-Acoustics loudspeaker systems in a multi-array configuration with spatial processing hardware and software-based audio tools to manage every step of an immersive audio project from the design through to the show itself.
Electronic artist Latroit, whose recent "Dance My Tears Away" was created and mixed in binaural audio using L-ISA Studio, comments on the simplicity of the user interface: "The graphic interface shows a visual representation of where sounds are in the 360 mix field, allowing you to effortlessly move sounds around, back, front, all very intuitively. L-ISA really makes mixing music fun. I believe that people are more likely to have fun listening to something if you were having fun while you made it."
The free version with binaural capability and the subscription version of L-ISA Studio are available on estore.l-acoustics.com. Discounts are available for students enrolled in qualified audio engineer programs.
www.l-acoustics.com
