Immersive Audio and the Room We Forgot

A few days ago, I posted a fairly blunt thought on LinkedIn.

I said I did not get the obsession with immersive audio for music (a bit of troll I must admit - but hear me out).

Part of the reason I posted it was to work out where Lowther sits in all this immersive audio chatter.

For film, gaming, VR, theatre and live experiences, of course it makes sense. You are building a world around someone. That is part of the point.

But for music?

I am a two-channel person. Proper loudspeakers already create immersion. Not the gimmick version, where a trumpet appears above your head for the sake of it, but the kind where the speakers disappear and the performance locks into place in front of you.

That post touched a nerve.

Some people agreed. Some strongly disagreed. Some work in immersive audio, spatial sound, cinema, live sound, recording, mixing and acoustics, and they pushed back in a way that made the discussion far more interesting than the original post.

It made me realise that the real question is not whether immersive audio is good or bad.

The real question is this:

What kind of listening are we talking about?

Because headphones, cinemas, theatres, live events, VR, spatial installations and home hi-fi are not the same thing. They do not ask the same questions. They do not solve the same problems.

And that is where this gets interesting.

Bad immersive is not the same as immersive audio

A fair criticism of my original post was that I may have been reacting to bad examples.

That is probably true.

There are bad stereo recordings. There are bad mono recordings. There are bad live mixes. So of course there are bad immersive mixes.

A few people made the point that proper spatial audio should not feel like a trick. It should not make you sit there thinking, “why is that horn section flying over my head?”

Done properly, the technology should almost disappear. You should feel the space without being constantly reminded of the format.

If immersive audio is used with intent and purpose, then it can clearly be a creative tool. I am not against artists writing specifically for spatial playback. If the format is part of the work from the beginning, that is a different conversation.

What I am less convinced by is taking music that was conceived, performed, mixed and released for stereo, then having someone other than the artist pull it apart years later so it can be sold again as an immersive experience.

That does not make every immersive remix wrong. There may be brilliant examples, and several people in the discussion pointed me towards recordings and mixes they feel prove the point.

But it does raise a question:

Is the new format serving the music, or is the music being used to sell the format?

That, for me, is the line.

Headphones may be where immersive makes the most sense

One of the more useful parts of the discussion was around headphones.

I see headphones as a different medium. They are intimate, convenient and private, but they are also isolated. The room is removed. The sound is delivered directly to your ears.

That changes everything.

With headphones, spatial audio, binaural recording, head-tracking and HRTF processing may be solving a real problem. They are trying to put back a sense of space that the medium has taken away.

That makes sense to me.

If you are listening on headphones, there is no physical listening room. There are no room reflections. There is no pair of loudspeakers energising the space in front of you. There is no sensation of a performance occupying the same air as you.

So if immersive processing can make headphone listening feel more external, more natural, and less trapped inside the head, then I can see the case for it.

In that context, immersive audio may be trying to restore the room.

But that is very different from home hi-fi in my opinion.

Because in hi-fi, the room was never missing.

Theatres, cinemas and live events are different again

Theatres, cinemas, VR, ballet, live events and places like the Sphere are a different conversation.

In those settings, immersive audio makes sense because the whole environment is being designed. Sound is part of the world being built around you.

That is not the same as sitting down at home to listen to an album.

A cinema has one job. A theatre has another. A live venue has another. A listening room has another.

My point was never that immersive audio has no place.

It was that home music listening is a very specific act, and I do not think more channels automatically make that act more musical.

In hi-fi, the room is part of the point

This is where I think two-channel hi-fi still has something very important to say.

With a proper pair of loudspeakers, the goal is not always to transport you into the recording studio. I know some people describe realism that way, and I understand it.

But for me, the magic is slightly different.

The goal is to let the artist appear in your room.

That is an important distinction.

Of course, the room has to be right. Bad reflections need controlling. Speaker placement matters. The listening position matters. The wrong room can make a great system sound ordinary.

But the room is not an error in the chain. It is not something to delete. It is part of the encounter.

This is especially true with loudspeakers that are built around speed, immediacy and coherence. A great two-channel system does not just throw sound left and right. It gives you width, depth, height, scale, placement and air.

It can make the wall behind the speakers disappear. It can put a vocal in front of you with real presence. It can make a live recording feel like a real event rather than a file being reproduced.

That is immersion.

Not because sound is coming from everywhere.

Because the system has stopped sounding like a system.

More channels does not automatically mean more music

Another point that came up in the comments was the cost and complexity of doing multi-channel properly.

More channels can mean more speakers, more amplifiers, more DAC channels, more processing, more calibration, more cable, more room problems and more chances for the system to become uneven.

That does not mean multi-channel cannot work.

It clearly can.

But it does challenge the idea that more speakers automatically creates a more musical result.

For a lot of homes, I still think there is a strong argument for putting the budget, care and room space into two great channels rather than spreading it across five, seven or more compromised ones.

That is not nostalgia. That is not fear of technology.

It is just a practical listening question.

What gives you the most believable, emotionally direct experience of music in your room?

For some people, the answer may be a properly designed immersive system. Fair enough.

For many others, I suspect it is still two excellent loudspeakers, placed well, in a room that lets them breathe.

Immersion or realism?

The best part of the discussion was that, underneath the disagreement, most people seemed to want the same thing.

Realism. Believability. Presence. A sense that the performance exists.

Some believe that requires more channels and true 3D audio. Others argue that a well-recorded performance on a great stereo system can already create a deeply convincing space.

I am in the second camp, at least for home listening.

Not because I think sound is two-dimensional. It obviously is not. Real sound exists in space.

But a two-channel system is not limited to two flat points of sound. The whole art of stereo is that two loudspeakers can create an image that extends beyond the boxes themselves.

The magic of stereo is not that sound comes from two places.

It is that two speakers can make the speakers disappear.

That, to me, is still one of the great illusions in music reproduction.

So where does Lowther sit in all this?

Lowther is not an immersive audio brand in the modern home theatre sense.

We are not trying to put a loudspeaker in every corner of the room. We are not trying to build an Atmos system. We are not trying to chase every new format.

Our starting point is simpler than that.

Two speakers. A room. A listener.

The idea that a great loudspeaker should make music feel immediate, physical and present.

That does not mean we are closed to immersive audio. Far from it. Anything that serves music is worth understanding. Headphones, binaural systems, spatial recording, theatre sound, live installations and purpose-built immersive music all have their place.

But for us, the listening room still matters.

The room is not missing. The room is where the music happens.

For headphones, immersive audio may be trying to restore the room.

For hi-fi, the room was never missing.

The discussion is the point

The LinkedIn thread changed my mind on one thing.

“Immersive audio” is too broad a phrase to dismiss in one go.

It means different things in different contexts. A theatre is not a pair of headphones. A cinema is not a listening room. A live arena is not a home hi-fi system. A piece of music written for spatial playback is not the same as a stereo master being reworked decades later.

So maybe the better question is not whether immersive audio is the future.

Maybe the better question is:

What kind of immersion are we trying to create?

For me, music listening at home is still about presence. Not spectacle. Not format. Not a technology demo.

The artist in the room.

The speakers disappearing.

The listener sitting down and paying attention.

That is the kind of immersion I still believe in.

Where do you stand? Is immersive audio the future of music listening, or are we in danger of forgetting what a great two-channel room can already do?

Get involved in the discussion here:

The Linkedin Post

(Go easy on me and please be polite)