Sam Inglis
Hello, you're listening to the Sound On Sound People & Music Industry Podcast with me, Sam Inglis. In this episode, I'm joined by Genelec's Andy Bensley and Aki Mäkivirta and we're going to be talking about Genelec's new UNIO system. Genelec have always been quite fond of acronyms. We already have GLM and SAM, which I'm obviously personally quite fond of, but now we're introducing UNIO, U N I O. What's it all about, Andy?
Andy Bensley
Hi Sam, thanks for having us. So the UNIO concept, we began talking about this maybe two or three years ago, where we kind of started to see different elements of our monitoring tools starting to kind of branch off into different areas, so kind of the idea being that we have a number of different monitoring tools, kind of whether that be standard monitors, subwoofers and then we had the kind of the idea of wanting to kind of bring these together with an element of more tactile control and how could we do that? And as we started to kind of develop this idea, we're kind of looking at some of the other peripherals that we've got and it kind of became clear that GLM was kind of the centerpiece for all of this and a means to be able to control all of these different technologies. So I suppose, to kind of sum it all up, the UNIO platform is a means of encompassing all of those monitoring technologies, whether they be peripherals, control elements, the calibration side of things, the physical hardware monitors, but also our software services as well. So the idea being that if you have a specific monitoring need, there's a tool set there which you can cherry pick from to kind of create your monitoring solution and that's kind of been capped off more recently with the PRM. So Genelec's first step into headphone reference monitoring.
SI
That was leading me on to my next question, Aki, which is, to implement the UNIO vision, you've actually had to introduce some new products. Tell us about these new products you've developed.
Aki Mäkivirta
Yes, the PRM actually is an extension of loudspeaker based monitoring in my mind. So if I can comment on what Andy just said about the concept of UNIO, then I view UNIO as unifying loudspeaker-based monitoring to using headphones to do something similar in a reliable fashion and in order to enable this, we have introduced a couple of things. The first one of those was a 9320 reference controller device and this device essentially provides a stereo monitoring capability extending to any size of immersive monitoring and giving you the ability to control anything that you monitor over loudspeakers. But it also comes with a very high quality headphone amplifier with some additional tools to enable you to improve accuracy of headphone based monitoring on personal level. So in order to use this platform device, then we also introduced the PRM concept that comes with the Genelec headphone, the first Genelec headphone that Genelec has ever made. And that headphone is uniquely serial number calibrated at the factory, exactly in the same way as we calibrate our monitoring loudspeakers in order to remove any variation from one unit to another. And then in the PRM we enable this complete system, the headphone plus the reference controller to work as a device that you can calibrate for yourself in order to make headphone based monitoring accurate and this whole system actually comes with an additional twist if you like and that is the Aural ID software and the Aural ID personal HRTF that enable you to then take the headphones once they have been calibrated for you and then use those to monitor anything from stereo to immersive audio in a manner that is very similar to what would happen on loudspeakers, simply because you are using your own way of hearing audio, your head related transfer function, in the processing of a multi-channel audio that is intended for to be monitored on loudspeakers. But instead of doing that, you direct this audio to this process of Aural ID rendering and we use your HRTFs to render exactly that same material in the same way over your headphones.
SI
It might be worth us going back a little then and looking at Aural ID, which is a technology that was introduced several years ago, but I think has flown a bit under the radar for some people. It's a software system that actually uses video. You take a video of your ears and it will calculate head-related transfer function from this, which can then be used to deliver a sort of personalized binaural fold down of whatever you're listening to. At the time Aural ID worked with any set of headphones. Why was it necessary to introduce your own headphones to make UNIO a thing?
AM
It still continues to work with any headphones, so that hasn't changed. But in order to make sure that you have the maximum accuracy and access to detail, as much detail as possible, we are introducing the headphone as well. So we are kind of taking steps to ensure that you can always achieve maximum precision with whatever you do step-by-step.
SI
And if you take the Genelec headphones with you out of the studio where you perhaps don't have your 9320A on the road, will you still be able to use that calibration and that personalized Aural ID HRTF?
AM
Certainly. So this is one of the key benefits that you can have with this type of technology. Headphones are easy to carry, you can always take them with you. They don't take up a lot of space in your luggage. And wherever you are, headphones give you access to detail. They help you to deal with any acoustics where you might be in. So if you are in your living room or in a hotel room or in some other space that is not optimized for monitoring audio, that doesn't have much significance if you are monitoring to audio using the headphones. And since the headphones, you can personally calibrate for yourself and also the Aural ID rendering you can personally calibrate for yourself, then you can achieve maximum accuracy in all monitoring situations and you become mobile. And that is one of the great benefits of this technology. And this is actually is one of the reasons why I think UNIO as the unification between large speaker-based monitoring and this type of headphone-based monitoring.
SI
That's very interesting. So Andy, I wonder if I could ask you a slightly philosophical question here. I mean, obviously I can see the benefits of having a unified monitoring system that sounds very similar across multiple environments and multiple devices. But also speaking for myself, I quite value the ability to switch between completely different monitoring setups, that's why I still keep my NS10s. That's often why I switch to headphones, is because I want a different perspective on the music. Is that still going to be possible when I have a UNIO system or will I be limited to this kind of one calibrated sound?
AB
No, I mean this, I think what we offer the user, the ability to do is kind of add different layers of customization, if you like. So kind of from the raw, uncalibrated headphone, then paired with the 9320, kind of unlocks a level of neutrality that's more akin to what you'd be familiar with, with your calibrated in-room system, so that would be kind of the first layer. Then you've got the ability to have more of an externalised experience with Aural ID. So kind of again, taking that sound from inside of the head and presenting it more akin and more familiar to an in-room system. And then you've got the ability to adjust the sound colour and character to be able to really dial that in so there's a one-to-one comparison. This is really beneficial if you want to move out of the room, like Aki said, so you bring your 9320 with you, your 8550 headphones, and you've got a calibrated reference that matches what's happening in your room so you've got a reference that you trust that can come with you. Now if you want that secondary reference, whether that be digital radio, a pair of Grok boxes, or an iPhone for example, it's still definitely worth a second check, absolutely. But I think what we've found with our calibrated systems, is we are kind of encouraging the user, empowering the user, to kind of feel a little bit more on the front foot, that you're not second guessing things quite as much. And I think the idea with UNIO is to bridge that gap between headphone monitoring and your in-room experience, so that you have a similar sound colour and familiarity. So when you move from the headphones, the job of work moving forward should be much more seamless and less of a shock. You know I think that's ultimately the goal here, is to reduce the number of additional reference points that you might traditionally reach for.
AM
Sam, can I ask you something? Are you, when you ask this question, are you thinking about how your mix translates across different systems? Is this what you have in mind?
SI
Translation is one issue, yes, but sometimes it just, it's refreshing to the ears to get a different perspective. And of course, you know that your listeners will be consuming your mix on a variety of different systems. So yes, I think it is important to audition your mixes on multiple listening environments. Does UNIO make this possible?
AM
Certainly, certainly. And something we try to achieve with all this calibration is that we try to maximize the likelihood that your mix translates, because one of the ways of looking at this is to understand that all these different reproduction systems are adding their own flavour because of many reasons. One reason just simply being that the environment is different. When we are working with the mix, we try to come up with the product that is able to deal with all of this and it's useful to have a system tha is not creating too much of an imprint on top of what you're working with in order for you to be able to work with the actual recording and that is something we are trying to achieve with all this calibration.
SI
I'd like to go a little bit deeper on that actually, because one, another philosophical difference I guess, between the Genelec approach and the approach taken by some rival companies is what you see in other systems is actual emulation of speaker systems in real world control rooms. I'm not going to name any names, but for example, like the idea is you can put on your headphones and you'll be magically transported to some sort of million dollar control room somewhere in the world. That's not the approach you've taken. Your aim with calibration is to approach a sort of more of a theoretical monitoring ideal, as I understand it. Is that correct?
AM
I guess you could word it that way, but essentially our finding has been that frequently when people are marketing these million dollar monitoring spaces for you on this software, then they are creating this imprint on whatever you're listening in that space. Now whether it's the actual room or the simulation of that space, now the question is does it make your work easier or harder? Or does it make something harder to understand in the mix or does it enhance the details or does it come in the way of you getting the work done and our finding has been that we want to minimize this kind of disturbance to actually working with the recorded material and you don't need much of emphasis from the space or from the reproduction gear or some other detail that is in the path from the recorded audio to what you hear before that starts modifying your understanding of the recording and can then lead to these difficulties with translating across different spaces where the reproduction can happen. So, many times people have to do this kind of mental averaging across different domains, different reproduction systems, to just understand that what is the constant character in my mix, what doesn't change when I take this mix to another space and that is kind of indirectly, you develop the understanding that this is the actual content in the mix and then you try to take this average in your mind and then work with this understanding to maybe improve something. Now it would be much faster, much easier if that those other factors were not in the way, if you were able to work directly with the recorded content and avoid having to do such an amount of mental averaging, because that's usually time consuming if nothing else.
SI
You make it sound almost as though headphones are then the ideal monitoring system and speaker based monitoring is a compromise compared to headphones.
AM
I wouldn't say that this would be the case. There are many reasons why we want to always refer back to loudspeaker based reproduction, but not in any room. I mean usually, you know, we are assuming that the room where this happens is of high quality, is giving a certain type of controlled and small enough imprint on what we are hearing. Certainly, if for no other reason, then I mean, we immediately recognise that traditional headphone reproduction has never been able to deliver you understanding of the soundstage, the virtual sound images, the depth and width of space in your recording in the same way as loudspeaker based reproduction can do. So what we are offering in Aural ID in the calibrated PRM system is a step towards being able to do the same. But we are not claiming that we would be 100 percent there or maybe even better than what you can do with loudspeakers. So I would say loudspeakers must remain the standard but at the same time, when we say this, it's not just in any room, it's not just any loudspeaker, so we have to require some quality out of the loudspeaker reproduction as well.
SI
One key difference between headphone monitoring and loudspeaker monitoring is that if you're listening on loudspeakers, then even a small movement of your head changes the sound. If you're listening on headphones, the sound remains completely constant, regardless of how your head is oriented or what you, how you move. Now some manufacturers have tried to compensate for this to a limited extent by incorporating head tracking into their headphone monitoring tools. Is that something you've looked into?
AM
We actually do the same in Aural ID, the upcoming version, the one we introduced recently in September. So you can use your telco camera in your computer, for example, to track your face. So, you have the ability if you are listening to immersive audio playback over headphones, you are able to look up to understand what your top level speakers are doing. You can look left or right to understand how that side of your presentation is working. So this enables you to do most of the things that you would do with loudspeaker setup. What we don't model is the situation where you're moving off the agreed geometry relative to your loudspeakers and the situation where your stereo imaging collapses. So we don't model this, but most of the other things we do.
SI
Excellent. So Andy, I mean, obviously the UNIO system, if you were building a studio from scratch, you could specify a UNIO system and you could go anywhere from basic stereo right up to a huge immersive system. I imagine most people who are considering this though will already have some sort of control room, they'll probably already have some speakers, they'll already have their acoustic treatment in place. How easy is it going to be to integrate a UNIO system, or retrofit a UNIO system into an existing environment?
AB
Well I think the idea of UNIO, it's not like you have to take the whole system. Like I say, you can cherry pick those elements that make sense to improve your monitoring or your workflow, for example. So if you're working predominantly in stereo, then immersive isn't a consideration for you. But having a calibrated reference that you trust implicitly, that's the goal. So the toolset that we could cherry pick from would be a stereo pair, possibly a subwoofer, a GLM kit to calibrate the system and then we could look at services like the grade report to give more of an insight into what's happening in the time domain and the acoustic properties of the space that you're working in. So those elements live within that uni or ecosystem. Conversely, if you were looking to expand an existing system into immersive, then we can add more sound monitors, we can add the 9325 monitor control, we could even add the 93, or the 9401, to kind of bridge that gap between an audio over IP system into an AES sound system, for example. So again, it's a toolset that you can cherry pick from and that's kind of what we spend a lot of time doing, is selecting the right tools to solve problems that customers may present to us.
SI
Well, that brings me to another question, which is the 9320A and Aural ID for example, are professional tools and they're priced at a professional level. If I'm someone who's maybe a home studio or a project studio user, I just have a basic stereo setup, that might seem like quite a large investment. Will they still offer me a worthwhile kind of improvement over what I already have or are they products that are really more suited to larger studios?
AB
Well, I would say depending on what the use case and what the needs are. If you're working in an environment where you've got to, say for example, you've got to stop working at 8 o'clock because the kids are in bed or the neighbours are home, then being able to switch over to a calibrated monitoring system, a headphone monitoring system, is going to be worth its weight in gold. You can continue that work and it's not going to be a shock when you move back to your calibrated sound system. I think what we're trying to achieve here is it is on the assumption that we work with these calibrated systems, we get it to a level where we trust them implicitly and it's like, how can we then bridge that gap between the headphone side of things so it's less of a shock, it's less of that kind of eartwist when you take the cans off, you know, and I think from our experience from the shows that we've been attending and the early feedback that we've got from existing SAM and Genelec users is that there is a level of familiarity between the PRM and switching back to the in-room system and that's stands us in very, very good stead to continue working with this theory and process in mind.
SI
And when you do escalate it to a larger system, perhaps a multi-room environment or something like that, or you have, you're a travelling engineer and you need to use your UNIO-enabled kit across multiple studios, is there a risk that you'll end up having to pay for sort of endless kind of licenses in order to use it on different devices or does a single UNIO license kind of travel with the individual? How does that work?
AB
There's not really a license as such, I mean there's, think of UNIO as basically a toolkit and then within that you may have your PRM for example. That's a one time purchase of the hardware and the calibration file that is associated with the 8550 headphones lives within the PRM, or that can be retrieved from the cloud for example if you wanted, if you paired it with a different set of 8550s. Where there is licensing, is related to your Aural ID and specifically your HRTF, for example. So when you generate your HRTF, all of that can be requested through your MyGenelec account. And again this is another element of UNIO. MyGenelec is kind of a portal for all of your product registrations, your software downloads and to be able to request your Aural ID and there's various different plans available that will be supporting Aural ID, but that's really the only kind of continuing purchase you would need to make, really, relating to the UNIO ecosystem.
SI
And from the other perspective, if I run a studio which is Genelec equipped and I have visiting engineers come in, it's easy for them all to sort of switch over to their own personal Aural ID settings and so on.
AB
Yeah, all of that is again available via MyGenelec account essentially. So you would log into that and then you would be able to download your HRTF and host that within Aural ID. Like I say, you don't, it's not absolutely mission critical that you use Aural ID, it's another layer that you can add into the process. It does give you more of an externalized experience. I think specifically within immersive formats, what you're able to do is closely mirror the positions and elevations of the monitors within the room. Like Aki says, we're not modelling the monitoring, we're not modelling the room as such but we certainly have the ability to be able to align the in-room positions with your perception over the headphones binaurally, which can be really useful if you're working away from that room and you're used to a specific layout. Again it's reducing that shock factor when you come back into the room and throw a mix up. All of that work that you've done already doesn't have to be undone. It's kind of removing these steps and these kind of secondary and tertiary thought processes that slow the whole process down. I think it's just trying to get things done quicker and these tools are designed to enable engineers to make those decisions that little bit quicker.
SI
So focusing a little more closely on the 9320A, I mean, one issue with monitor controllers generally is you find one that has the perfect features, but it's really hard to integrate into your existing system. When it came to designing this device, what were your considerations in terms of connectivity?
AM
Yeah, there were actually many ideas of how we would like to enable 9320 in various situations. So on one hand, 9320 enables direct monitoring from computer, making your minimum monitoring system extremely light. So it has the USB audio straight into the device and you can reproduce that through loudspeakers or the headphone and so this is one of the aspects here regarding connectivity. This enables the super light studio without compromising quality. Then the other aspect that we had in mind was the idea that we would like to enable people to have a sufficient connectivity across different domains, so we are providing line input, AES EBU inputs, line output, AES EBU output to monitoring loudspeakers, so now you can mix and match effectively, you know, depending on what kind of environment you happen to be in. You can accept signals of various types. you can establish connectivity so you can get to monitoring in very efficient way in various types of environments.
SI
But you don't have to have your main monitoring system connected through the 9320?
AM
Well actually no. So let me kind of explain this a bit more. You have the possibility of routing signal, stereo signal to monitoring loudspeakers, but you don't have to do this at all. So the 9320, one of the key features of what that can do for you, it can work as the tangible user interface for your GLM monitor control system, so this enables 9320 to control any size of monitoring system up to the highest channel count immersive playback systems. And this means that we have a seamless co-operation between the 9320 physical device and GLM software, the software that is actually seeing all the monitoring loudspeakers and adjusting those exactly the way you need.
SI
And talking about the other new physical device, the headphones you've introduced, I guess a lot of people would think, well, it's quite natural for a loudspeaker company to make headphones and for a headphone company to make loudspeakers. But in fact the technologies are quite different and although Genelec has been around since the late 1970s, you've never made a pair of headphones before. Was it challenging to actually develop your own headphones?
AM
Oh extremely challenging. So basically, you know, one of the things that you have to realize is that headphones depend on the person who is listening with the headphones and headphones are a device that is kind of inherently using at least part of the human head-related transfer function in order to render, in order to deliver neutral sounding audio. Now this means that we have an interesting twist, you know. Whenever you're looking at headphones, they look like a simple device, but in fact you have to provide in the headphones a frequency response that sounds plausible to you if you want your headphones to sound neutral. And as we know, over the years, there has been a huge amount of debate and different opinions about how this should be done and then many, many different opinions across users of headphones about what sounds neutral and what doesn't sound neutral. And a lot of this actually is linked to the fact that we are not exactly the same, you know, each one of us we have a slightly different shape and size and this is in fact what gives us our head-related transfer function, our ability to hear direction and sound colour in different directions and all of this translates to your expectation of how the headphone should work. And unfortunately, this means that for any two or three of us, you know, we are not going to share exactly the same understanding of how this particular headphone will sound. And now there's a challenge. This is a big challenge to conquer. You want to provide a headphone that is giving you this impression of neutral audio, accuracy, access to detail and so that that's a formidable request and we have been looking at this very hard. And this is one of the reasons why we are actually offering 8550, not as a headphone in its own right, but as an active headphone that's always working with 9320, because this combination not only gives us the unique equalization for each headphone at the factory, but also it gives the user the ability to go in and do this personal calibration, which I think is super important because we are not exactly the same, we have different shape and different HRTF. So it makes good sense for us to go in and to really spend a bit of time to end up with the settings that give me the most neutral audio reproduction as possible.
SI
So the digital processing that equalizes the headphones and applies the HRTF, does that take place in the 9320 or does it take place in the headphones or does it take place in software running on your computer?
AM
The equalization that is related to the headphone device takes place in 9320, but the binaural rendering that uses your full HRTF for rendering the audio playback, let's say you're listening to an immersive presentation and we are rendering this for you, this takes place in your computer using your HRTF in the Aural ID software. And this Aural ID software is now coming as a virtual sound card that you install in your computer and this means that you can be rendering audio from any source in your computer. It could be a DAW, it could be a livestream, it could be any source of audio in your computer that you can use with this approach.
SI
So in practical terms, how would you recommend setting things up, supposing that I'm working in my studio, I have a speaker system, I also want to be able to put on my headphones and audition through the Aural ID system. Would I ask my DAW to address both the physical sound card and a virtual sound card or would I run the Aural ID as a plug-in? What's the most ergonomic solution there?
AM
Yeah, the Aural ID is now featured as a virtual soundcard, so the plug-in option is no longer going to be available. This actually simplifies life for you tremendously regarding your DAW configuration and just making sure that the monitoring is happening in the correct way and so what you would do is you would direct the audio that is intended for monitoring either to loudspeakers or then to this virtual sound card that is the Aural ID.
SI
So as I understand it, that's possible on the Mac OS operating system because Core Audio generally supports the use of multiple audio devices simultaneously. Does that mean that GLM and UNIO are currently Mac only?
AM
GLM is certainly available on both platforms, Windows platform and Mac platform. The Aural ID processing at the moment is available on Mac platform.
SI
And if I want to upgrade my existing Genelec system so that I can get all the key benefits of UNIO, it will likely work with whatever I have, as long as I have a Mac based studio. I'm not going to need to do radical upgrades elsewhere in the studio.
AM
No, actually no, once you are using GLM SAM system then the transition is going to be extremely smooth and Aural ID actually integrates completely with GLM. There's connectivity, co-operation between the two and so this experience will be very smooth.
SI
Well, I must say I'm very much looking forward to trying it out for myself. I wonder if I could just conclude by asking you, obviously this is, as it were, the fruition of a vision that must have been in development for a really long time and all the individual elements such as GLM and SAM have appeared over the years, and now they've been tied together under this one kind of overarching vision. Are you able to share anything about where you might be taking this in the future?
AM
Yes, I mean, we have been following this same path for the, you know, four to five years now and the path is to enable engineers to do accurate and reliable work. So we are certainly going to keep on doing the same in the near future, you know, following this path of trying to help people who are working with audio get the work done efficiently with accuracy, taking away the unknown factors in this complete process. So that certainly is what we are looking for.
SI
Fantastic. Well, like I say, I'm very much looking forward to trying it out for myself and reviewing it for Sound On Sound. In the meantime, a big thank-you to my guests, Andy Bensley and Aki Mäkivirta from Genelec. It's been great to have you on the podcast today.
AB
Thank-you.
AM
Thank-you.
SI
Thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcasts website page, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.
