APL Virtuoso v2

Screen 1: Virtuoso’s default View page.

Based on cutting‑edge psychoacoustic research, Virtuoso v2 aims to deliver for headphone users the most convincing emulation of ‘speakers in a room’ to date.

APL Virtuoso is a plug‑in and standalone binaural renderer built on technology developed by Dr Hyunkook Lee, Professor of Audio and Psychoacoustic Engineering and Director of Applied Psychoacoustics Lab (APL) and the Centre for Audio and Psychoacoustic Engineering at the University of Huddersfield. The core psychoacoustic 3D modelling technology of Virtuoso is known as ASPEN (APL Spatial Audio Engine) and, along with its use in Virtuoso v2, APL say that it will soon be available for licensing.

Virtuoso lives in the same kind of territory as Stephen Slate Audio VSX, Sonarworks SoundID Reference Virtual Monitoring, Acustica Audio Sienna, Dsoniq Realphones, and Waves Abbey Road Studio 3, in that it aims to deliver over headphones a representation of the sound and spatial quality of monitors in a room. However, rather than modelling only stereo monitoring, Virtuoso is able to model a comprehensive variety of multi‑channel immersive formats. Everything from, say, 5.1.2 Atmos to Auro 3D 13.1, and numerous varieties in between. At the time of writing, I believe only Acustica Audio Sienna, among the similar products I mentioned above, can work beyond stereo.

Overview

The standalone version of Virtuoso is available for both Windows and macOS, and its plug‑in version covers AU, AAX and VST3 formats. The specifics of the integration of the plug‑in within a DAW session will depend very much on the channel width of the session and personal routing and workflow preferences, so beyond simply installing the plug‑in and checking its functionality in Pro Tools, I concentrated for this review on using the standalone version.

Once installed and running (which requires iLok authorisation), Virtuoso can model 53 different monitor configurations, from mono to 26 channels, including immersive audio formats such as Dolby Atmos, ITU‑R, Auro‑3D, MPEG‑H and Ambisonics arrays. Any of those monitor configurations can be heard in seven different virtual rooms with customisable acoustic parameters such as ambience, reverb time and listening distance. Virtuoso also offers headphone head tracking support, headphone response compensation with 100 stored headphone models, monitor frequency response modelling with 11 stored monitor models, routing and downmix options, and 10‑band parametric headphone EQ. Finally, the standalone version of Virtuoso offers WAV and ADM (Dolby Atmos delivery format) file playback.

The View...