How Loss><Gain and d&b Soundscape are creating a new era of immersive music experiences

After a strong start in gaming and VR, object-based audio is making inroads into live sound. The terms ‘spatial’ and ‘immersive’ are used a lot to describe this new technique, and are perhaps in danger of diluting its importance. But they are useful. This is not merely surround sound; it has many applications that, quite seriously, could reinvent the wheel of professional audio in the way that stereo, 5.1 and even line array have done in the past. But what if there was a third way between studio and stage? What if there was a way of presenting music that was so realistic, so engaging, that the blurred lines between live and playback disappeared? To do this would bring economies of scale that would tick the sustainability box, give venues and promoters much easier access to the material of busy or remote artists and create a new event ethos. It would also require a sound reinforcement system that melted into the music.

If all this sounds a little far-fetched, it’s time to meet Loss><Gain. Not a band; not an end-of-year financial adjustment buzzword; not the switch that fell off Nigel Tufnel’s Marshall stack. 

Loss><Gain is described by its founders as an“immersive experience partnership”, and they are sound designer David Sheppard and erstwhile Sigur Rós manager John Best. 

They steer a collaborative network of visual designers, lighting engineers, producers and creative consultants who enable them to ‘stage’ – not really the right word – events in which specific music is played to audiences welcomed into a venue transformed by their work. There may have been a time, long ago, when this sort of thing was called psychedelic. Today, we’re going to have to come up with something better than that.

Best has spent several years touring the world with Sigur Rós’ unique ‘Liminal’ concept, where music listening meets wellbeing in venues ranging from art galleries to Hyde Park. They’ve also been called ‘sound baths’, but ‘gig yoga’ might be more accurate because they are less passive than the idea of merely soaking up and nodding off suggests. 

Although sleep is indeed a healing state that the band is keen to explore aesthetically, the hidden active ingredients of focused musical meditation are well to the fore, leading one review in Vogue magazine to comment that “If there’s one band qualified to blur the line between meditation and the music world, it’s Sigur Rós”. The Sunday Times simply states: “The gig is reinvented”. A three-hour taster is available on most streaming platforms.

But the main reason why comparisons with the '60s are inadequate is that the chief modus operandi of Loss><Gain is d&b audiotechnik’s Soundscape system, the object-based audio solution that fills the space with a different kind of hallucination. 

The audio envelopes the audience from a 360° array of loudspeakers, and is so subtle as to make the speakers, in John Best’s description, “disappear”. The sources are less specific and less condensed than a conventional loudspeaker system and, arguably, reproduce the instruments and voices with such understated clarity that it’s better than the real thing – if the real thing is a bunch of unruly microphones and backline struggling to disperse in halls not especially calibrated for them.

That’s certainly the view of David Sheppard, who has been mixing various music programmes for Loss><Gain events at a studio quietly nestled in Slad Valley near Stroud in Gloucestershire, where, just as Elon Musk fondly imagines, the Hobbits smoke their pipe-weed. 

There’s nothing misty about the set-up: a desktop PC running Reaper inputs to d&b’s DS100 Signal Engine, and monitoring is via 15 speakers from the xS-Series of very compact, coaxial point source boxes: five 5S; and ten 4S, powered by four 30D installation-model 4-channel amplifiers. There is also one T-SUB, for now, which is an active bass-reflex loudspeaker with a high excursion 15-inch driver.

Sheppard has made a speciality of mixing sound art, where gallery spaces and other inspiring locations are transformed into the kind of immersive experiences that use the virtues of real space rather than the space stations of virtual reality.

Loss><Gain, then, combines a kind of Icelandic sonic massage with consummately cultured audio, and over the last few years has popped up across a network of esoteric venues like slow-moving lava through tundra. 

The titles tell their own story – Immersive Fields, Moonbathing, Still, Sky Burial, Sacred Sound 360, Cathedral Oceans – while collaborating artists range beyond Sigur Rós to John Foxx, Richard Norris, Super Furry Animals, Public Service Broadcasting and Gaunt, among many others. 

At the moment, the pair are busy with a European tour celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the seminal Sigur Rós album Takk, which presents the music in a new spatial mix by Sheppard alongside sympathetic visual installations.

This mix was a typical Soundscape labour of love. “When we discussed the idea with the band,” Sheppard recounts, “they said it wouldn’t be possible because there were no stems. 

But it turned out that they’d mixed live in the desk, adding processing at that stage, so what existed as multitrack components was raw input from the studio – including sources that were not used in the final mix. Actually, that helped in letting me rebuild sections almost from scratch, together with a reference from the finished stereo master.

“What you then accept is that this is not a standard spatialized mix from processed stems, but a re-working of the album. For example, in one song, I only had a distorted guitar track but needed a clean one to recreate the master. Using stem separation provided a version of the clean, but it had to remain in a fixed location, so I used the distorted version spatially to create a feeling of space and breath. 

As with mixing a live show, there are many ways you can draw the ears of the audience to accept that this is the sound for that part, but with Soundscape, you can establish that this is a performance version of the album beyond the stereo fixed version. It’s the same music, it has the same beauty and impact, but it’s much more than simple playback.”

Preserving the authenticity of the stereo album is a complex issue, just as it is with Dolby Atmos mixes. Fortunately, Sheppard has a good understanding with the band. “Because they didn’t hear it till it was done,” he says, “I stayed as loyal as possible to the master. They did say they’d compressed the guitars a lot more than I did, but I said I chose less compression because, in a space like this, you feel like they’re in the room with you. In a gig, you want them blasting out of a cabinet, part of the wall of sound, but in this situation, you want to feel the presence of the instrument.”

The room is fairly lively, although drapes and rugs are available to calm things down, and this adds to the concert mood injected into the stems as you mix, even though everything is in the box. The band is clearly happy with the results, however, as Best explains.

“They’ve asked us for a Soundscape system like this in their studio in Iceland,” he reveals, “so they can have a dialogue with us about creating work going forward. For example, they thought we’d added chorus to some strings, but we hadn't – it was just the natural effect of the strings in the space created by the mix. And the reason we’re doing that is to create an organic sense that you’re inside this breathing piece of music – not listening to a wall of speakers. They got it!”

This is pivotal. For the most part, at least with Sigur Rós, Loss><Gain has been working with existing music. Now, there is the real possibility of creating new music alongside them. “It’s not the first time we’ve used music made for Soundscape,” adds Best, “but it would be the first time we’ve done it with a band who can play four nights at The Royal Albert Hall.”

As part of a long-standing relationship with d&b, the studio also acts as another demo space for Soundscape, where relatively local artists and engineers can get their hands on a compact and very accessible version of the system and set out like Bilbo Baggins upon their quest to find the One Ring of spatial audio. 

And speaking of invisibility… “With d&b’s kit, it sounds like real instruments in the room, not speakers,” reflects Best. “It’s a completely new ticket.”