Natalia Mamcarczyk On Standards For Binaural Mixing
Spatial audio production is still commonly designed around loudspeaker arrays, with binaural headphone rendering treated as a translation check near the end. That order is hard to defend when headphones account for most consumer listening, because localization problems found during the final check may already be baked into the composition and mix.
Natalia Mamcarczyk is a spatial audio sound designer and engineer working with Audioscenic to examine how binaural monitoring can take a larger role earlier in production. Her work covers immersive recording, monitoring decisions, headphone translation, and systems that can make spatial production accessible without asking every engineer to install a full multichannel speaker array.
Ahead of WMC 2027, we spoke with Mamcarczyk about the conventions inherited from film and sonic arts, how engineers can divide monitoring time between headphones and speakers, and which investments could help spatial music reach a wider group of creators.
She also discusses the need for clearer binaural standards and Audioscenic’s SBX-1 soundbar for spatial music production and you can be apart of these types of conversations by purchasing your badge for Winter Music Conference 2027 right here,
Interview With Natalia Mamcarczyk
Binaural rendering is commonly positioned near the end of spatial-audio production. Which technical assumptions support that convention, and where do they fail?
Commercial immersive audio has two main roots: sonic arts, including experimentation, channel-based conventions, and diffusion, and film surround sound production, which is screen-centric. The two approach production differently and take discrete-speaker playback or an object-based approach as the priority.
It could be argued that those approaches are performance- and auditorium-based, in situ as a special treatment. With spatial audio entering people’s home experiences, beyond the once-popular 5.1 DVD setups, the main listening device for people enjoying immersive music at a consumer level is headphones. Research points to 80–90% of usage.
When music production took on the challenge of embedding Dolby Atmos or Sony 360 Reality Audio music into commercial workflows, such as their addition to commonly used DAWs, the workflows seemed quite inspired by the approaches used in channel-based and film surround conventions: a clear stage center, stereo translation, and surrounds and rears used for occasional effects and reverbs. A chunk of research in audio production points toward that tendency, especially five years ago during the spatial music expansion in the industry.
Those workflows, however, are not focused on headphone translation. If we were to analyze the majority of tutorials available online for producers mixing immersively, headphone translation is often mentioned as the final step. Often, there is no mention of a loudness LUFS limit for the binaural mix.
When binaural translation is not considered from the start, it seems to lead to a complete process omission. This means that aspects that could be challenging in binaural reproduction, such as the cone of confusion, height and rear localizability in critical bands, or stereo collapse, are not considered until the very end, when the piece has fully formed and should then not be taken apart. This means that the audience using headphones to learn about spatial music for the first time gets a poorly translated and likely discouraging experience.
How should engineers divide monitoring time between loudspeaker playback, binaural headphones, and conventional stereo?
There are various philosophies of mixing and time distribution. Starting the mix with headphones and finishing it on speakers is one of them. The headphone-first approach has been practiced by a few incredibly successful immersive music producers. Andrew Scheps, for instance, openly praises this approach, and you may be aware of Max Cooper’s impressive binaural-only productions from 3D Reworks 001.
An even distribution, and therefore equal importance of binaural and discrete-channel playback, is another. It possibly extends the mixing process and the amount of back-and-forth, but offers more promise of equal consideration and mutual leadership between the two approaches. What some may not mention is the stereo consideration, which does not belong to everyone’s philosophy but is certainly a requirement from labels and artists to ensure a close translation between the 3D mix and its stereo original or fold-down. It potentially prevents some experimentation and also affects how the binaural mix is defined.
The immersive-first philosophy, featured by recent Grammy winners in the Immersive category such as Hans-Martin Buff and Justin Gray, demonstrates the successful implementation of immersive imagination from the creation process, throughout production and mixing, all the way to mastering. This also prevents the binaural mix from becoming a stereo-led composition, which can easily collapse in such a way if not carefully crafted. A strong inclusion of binaural elements and monitoring with that 3D-led mindset leads to really successful mixes that fully take advantage of the format.
As with any audio mixing, there should not be a single philosophy or solution, so it is recommended that everyone try what they prefer. There is certainly a need to focus more on bringing binaural processing earlier into creation and mixing, as it is in a binaural-centric or 3D-led approach.
It is easier to reach ear exhaustion when using studio headphones rather than speakers, but we need to remember that this is the exhaustion our main listener will be dealing with as well if they have no listening alternative to headphones. If we cannot equip every listener with a set of 12 speakers and all the required technology, perhaps we should consider how engineers and listeners can create and access those productions more easily. This suggests that there is a genuine need for devices that are not headphones but are also less demanding than a full immersive speaker-array setup.
What investments should commercial studios prioritize if binaural listening is the primary destination for spatial releases?
It currently does not seem like binaural listening is becoming any less important for audiences and first-time consumers. What studios should invest in is the time to focus on binaural production in a meaningful way: native binaural recordings, binaural monitoring during recording, which not many types of software easily allow in real time, and decision-making around panning and EQ during production and mixing.
I see commercial or high-impact music studios with Atmos or other immersive capacity as almost mixing-and-mastering-in-one facilities. They all share a similar monitoring setup, with PMC or Genelec speakers calibrated and tonally aligned. This is a fantastic final standards checkpoint for immersive music.
Perhaps there is also room to allow more consideration for home- or project-studio-produced tracks that need final tonal and spatial alignment. Those studios could become a great client for that work. If more people made music at home and in their project studios, having had access to the right tools to get started, the immersive music industry would significantly grow and become more independent, diverse, and powerful.
What is potentially required here is a device or set of tools that provides easy access to creation. This is something that we are trying to address at Audioscenic with the SBX-1 soundbar for spatial music creators. It offers a reduced number of logistical setups to help people sit down and get started with production, just as many people do these days with a license for Ableton or Logic and a few plugins. It is the magic of modern music, and I would like to see it in immersive audio as well.
What kind of technical standards could have the best effect on making binaural-first production dependable across professional audio systems?
With immersive audio still being a fairly novel concept in commercial and independent music production, we learn practices and standards from the main creators. Those who lead successful releases become the mentors and drive the development of software, hardware, and education in this field. This also potentially places an incredible amount of responsibility on creators, something that perhaps was not as much of a pressure on stereo music producers when music production was not such a widely accessed space.
Therefore, some of this standardization is unofficial. It is led by authority and a trialled process.
Some wider consideration for including binaural audio performance in standardization could also be valuable. For example, labels could consider loudness and translatability standards between the binaural mix and the discrete-channel version. The SPL calibration of headphones while mixing does not seem to be mentioned in any of the specifications for music or audiovisual streaming platforms.
It could also be more encouraging to enter this world if we stopped aiming for spatial audio to be a “Stereo+” version. There is more to the creative process and platform itself, which can go much further beyond stereo, so this standard has the potential to set a limitation on a fairly boundless and expressive format.
