Thomas Rechberger

What I love about creating VR sound spaces is that the degree of immersion and presence is so closely linked to the sound and the overall feeling of the movie. The better the sound, the faster and deeper you can dive into the VR experience. A well-sounding spatial audio mix makes a VR experience feel so much more enjoyable, emotional and authentic.

I love using the AMBEO VR Mic for the underlying 3D sound sphere in VR post-production. The sound of the mic is very transparent and detailed and with the AMBEO plug-in, it is easy to make adjustments. I usually add additional close mics, lavaliers and sound design elements like backgrounds, foley and FX to the 3D sound sphere of the scene. For post-production, I work in Pro Tools with a combination of the FB 360 Spatial Workstation and Audio Ease 360pan suite for fast moving objects. Apart from the Harpex B and my usual plug-ins for music production and film sound, I use the AMBEO plug-in for almost every session. It is very easy to rotate the sound field with the AMBEO plug-in and I like the general sound of it.

The AMBEO VR Mic is very easy to handle on film sets and has a small footprint. I also love to use it for recording 5.1 backgrounds for cinema because it is so small and handy. When recording in the Ambisonics format, I appreciate that I can adjust parameters like direction and width in my DAW later in the process.

In a recent VR project called ANGST360° for the Zurich University of the Arts, we used the AMBEO VR Mic on set as well as in the studio for recording the film score. Four (!) highly talented composers worked on the soundtracks. We recorded the music with both AMBEO VR and conventional studio mics and then used the Ambisonics recordings for spatial sound, 3D ambient sound, sampling and spatialized musical performances.
Two composers even used the mic for the 3D panning of their electronic music. In the process, they re-amped all their spatialized stems in a quad-format speaker system with the AMBEO VR Mic in the center.

The goal of the soundtrack was to make the emotional aspects of fear more tangible and enable the audience to better understand and connect to the three protagonists. We experimented a lot with the sound and ended up with an interesting mix of music and sound design elements placed both in the 3D sound sphere and the head-locked part of the audio content.