It is just a matter of weeks since Virtuoso first came to my attention courtesy of Mark Gittins’ excellent review but I appear to have been influenced by his positivity as I’ve been testing Virtuoso for a couple of weeks now and I’m in!

I wasn’t familiar with this particular tool but, unlike Mark who because of his excellent 9.1.4 Atmos room at Sensound will be using binaural more as a reference, I’ve been using it as a primary monitoring method while mixing immersive content. No matter how good a job a binaural rendering is doing of representing a mix via headphones, the unanimous advice of professional mix engineers working on Dolby Atmos content is that you have to hear your mix over loudspeakers. However, that doesn’t mean that you have to use loudspeakers exclusively. Virtualisations like this are valid in any production.

The main purpose of Virtuoso is mixing over headphones but it's also being used for binaural live streaming, for native binaural albums and remote QC for post production. This last example is particularly pertinent considering the activity and uptake of remote mix approvals which are relatively easy to perform for stereo content but present particular challenges when faced with immersive content.

I’m not lucky enough to have an Atmos monitoring system at home and being very aware of the developments in Atmos mixing I’m always motivated to check out anything new which allows me to experiment with and learn the workflows associated with Dolby Atmos from the comfort of my headphones. To that end I’ve checked out a few virtualisation products, from the stock binaural renderer in the Dolby Atmos Renderer itself, through to some premium products which use personalised HRTFs for added realism. As such, I think I’m well placed to assess the success of products which seek to use binaural techniques to render a convincing and useful Atmos experience over headphones.

Having tried Virtuoso for a few days I can say that Virtuoso is something a little special. I’m lucky enough to have very average ears in terms of their shape and I’ve found that default HRTFs translate well for me. Other products I’ve tried have been anywhere from useful to satisfyingly convincing but I have found in the past that there is a tradeoff between positional acuity and timbral accuracy. The products which rendered the most convincing positional information also sounded the most coloured.

Virtuoso combines the best of both in that it both sounds natural and manages to present directional information clearly. Combine that with a very complete feature set and you have an extremely compelling proposition, and one which to me earns its place on my iLok. No question. Left/right is easy. Height is more difficult but the real telltale which differentiates the best from the others for me is front to back. Check out this video, particularly from 2.40 to hear how convincing the localisation is.

This video refers to a previous version of Virtuoso so keep that in mind when it refers to features limitations.

Virtuoso is the best I’ve heard when it comes to Atmos monitoring over headphones. Being someone who wants to experiment with Atmos without having to install a major studio upgrade first, this is great news, but the other disincentive to the ‘Atmos-curious’ like me is the relative complexity of setting up Pro Tools for Dolby Atmos. The recent introduction of an integrated Dolby Atmos Renderer within Pro Tools has lowered the bar considerably on the complexity of session setup meaning that you get to spend more time mixing and less time in the IO Setup window.

A remaining barrier was a degree of faff in the set-up of Virtuoso to monitor a Pro Tools mix. In his review Mark set his system up by routing a re-render from the Dolby Atmos Renderer to the Virtuoso standalone App via Pro Tools’ Aux IO. The integrated Dolby Atmos Renderer supports live re-renders within Pro Tools meaning that mixing via Virtuoso is as simple as setting up a custom Live Re-render and inserting Virtuoso on an Aux receiving that re-render in Pro Tools.

How To Set Up A Dolby Atmos Binaural Re-render With APL Virtuoso In Pro Tools

The setup is simple:

On the subject of headphone EQ settings, I’ve seen these headphone-specific settings before but I was pleased to see that my choice wasn’t enforced by a scarcity of options in the profiles available. In Virtuoso, I found not only my Neumann NHD20s but also my preferred Austrian Audio HiX65s, my Sennheiser HD25s and even my Apple AirPods Pro 2. With the newly introduced ability to import custom settings too, and SOFA files for a personalised HRTF, things are very customisable indeed.

New Features in Virtuoso

• You can now load a custom headphone EQ WAV file. (e.g. You can try various different profiles for given headphones available from an open-source library.

• The SOFA file previously loaded is recalled upon reopening VIRTUOSO (you no longer have to load the SOFA file every time you open the plugin)

• The output volume has been increased to match the level of the stereo input.

Since its release Virtuoso has been well received by professionals working with immersive content. For example:

Michael Patterson: 2X Grammy winning mixer/producer (Beck, Jay Z, TLC, The Social Network)...

I've been mixing almost exclusively in headphones for the last six years, and Virtuoso is the best binaural monitoring tool I've used. The records that I have mixed using Virtuoso have translated exceptionally well to speakers and radio, while the score I just mixed translated flawlessly to the dub stage. The ability to adjust the parameters of the "room" allows me to recreate some of my favorite mixing studios to the point where I close my eyes and I feel as if I am sitting in those rooms listening to a playback. Other apps only let you tweak one or two parameters, while Virtuoso enables you to build an entire room how you want. Being able to choose between speaker models in Virtuoso allows me to not only mix on speakers I know well but also allows me to hear the mix how the artist I am mixing will listen to it, as using the speaker models that come with Virtuoso I can easily switch to the speakers they are monitoring through. In my opinion, Virtuoso is way ahead of the competition.

Matthew Chan: Re-recording mixer (Halo2, Halo, The Iron Claw, Code8)

We used APL Virtuoso for approval playbacks on Halo Season 2 (on Paramount+). We stumbled upon Virtuoso and found it to have the most convincing immersive/spatial render of any plugin we’d tested. You truly feel as though the sound is moving around you. Also, importantly, it provides a lot of effective control that we felt was missing from other plugins (ability to dial back the room effect, individual channel controls…). We were able to build a preset that was very relatable to our Atmos/Meyer dubstage. We previewed the opening of the first episode in stereo and binaural for our new showrunner, he immediately chose binaural upon hearing the difference. As remote playbacks are becoming more common, I expect we will employ Virtuoso for more of our shows at Formosa Toronto.

Emre Ramazanoglu: Mixer/Songwriter (Noel Gallagher, Lily Allen, Sia, Mark Ronson):

Virtuoso is an unprecedented solution to the challenge of finding reliable, accurate software-based binaural monitoring for working on spatial mixes when away from the studio. APL have made it very straightforward to model a familiar space or experiment with new environments. Highly recommended.

Dror Mohar: Sound designer/re-recording mixer (The Wolverine, The Greatest Showman, Divergent, The Revenant):

Virtuoso is phenomenal. The imaging of multichannel mixes on headphones is truly immersive. The translation of Atmos on headphones literally had me check that the monitors weren’t on a few times. I also used it in conjunction with some delays and verbs to create textures and atmospheres that turned out great. I love it.

It looks like I’m not alone in being very impressed with Virtuoso. It’s the right product at the right time for me as, coinciding as it does with the introduction of an integrated renderer and custom Live Re-Renders in Pro Tools, it has become not only easy but enormous fun to mix immersive on headphones in Pro Tools. I just wonder whether this is a gateway drug to me buying a ton of new loudspeakers for the studio…