The San Diego-based company behind Spatial Mic, Voyage Audio, has appointed Emerging as exclusive distributor for the UK and Ireland. ‘We already have an impressive range of products to manage immersive audio for mixing and mastering, and having a product like Spatial Mic that can capture live such an impressive range of immersive formats, completes the picture for us,’ says Emerging MD, Paul Mortimer.
The original Spatial Mic employed USB/Adat connectivity and this has been joined more recently by a Dante version. Both microphones haveeight-capsule arrays that support Second-Order Ambisonics. The body of the mics contain high-quality A/D conversion using a high-resolution Skyworks clocking scheme and built-in 32-bit XMOS processor.
The soundfield parameters of the mic are controlled by the Spatial Mic Converter plug-in (AAX, Audio Unit and VST3). The plug-in transforms the raw audio signals to a production-ready format. The output can be First-Order or Second-Order Ambisonics in AmbIX or Fuma, mono or stereo virtual mics, or up to 7.1.4 surround. This is achieved by using a 64-channel filter matrix with measurements from an anechoic chamber. The Ambisonic output can be sent to a variety of plug-ins for further processing and the surround outputs can be used as sound bed tracks in Dolby Atmos sessions or routed to the surround bus of choice. The Virtual Mic output allows a remarkable variation of capsule polar patterns, and a Mid-Side stereo output can also be derived with pattern, balance and output adjustments. The surround output can be configured in virtually every format from 5.1 to 7.1.4.
Spatial Mic is equally at home in studio, broadcast, field and live concert recording settings, where the remote control of the capsules and the output are valuable. In broadcast, Spatial Mic Dante has already proven invaluable to deliver up to 5.1.2 Atmos feeds directly from the mic itself using its embedded DSP. Recording spatial sound effects for film, TV and games is now hugely important and, again, it is easily portable and fully capable of delivering whatever configuration is needed for the final production.
The Dante version is particularly well suited to simplifying VR/AR workflows and here the connection via Cat5E cable with PoE (Power over Ethernet) directly to the Dante network is advantageous. In this scenario, a simplified application, MicNet Control can be run on the same computer to adjust the output settings of any Spatial Mic on the network. The USB/Adat version can provide simple connectivity to a laptop or mobile device and is suited to working in conjunction with a 360° camera.
For immersive audio, Spatial Mic supports different decoding of the original recording that may be developed in the future. With the importance of VR, particularly for gaming, Six Degrees of Freedom (6DoF) allows the user to move within the environment with the sound changing as it would naturally. Impulse responses can be captured by a network of Spatial Mic Dante microphones and synthesised by the game engine to create a realistic immersive environment.
Colin Ritchie and Steve Silva are co-founders of Voyage Audio and have extensive experience in the design of microphones and software for recording and production. ‘We were impressed with Emerging’s focus on quality products that support immersive audio production,’ Ritchie says. ‘Clearly, they have the technical expertise and practical experience to properly support the product, so we think this partnership will be hugely successful.’
