AES Europe 2026

Immersive music is at a critical point in its development.
While production tools, workflows, and distribution models have begun to stabilise, the market remains fragile, and long-term adoption is far from guaranteed.

New immersive audio formats are now entering a field where creators, labels, and platforms have only recently started to commit resources and build confidence. This raises a fundamental question: does the introduction of additional formats strengthen immersive music, or does it increase uncertainty at a time when the market can least afford it?

This panel-based workshop focuses on immersive audio formats for music and explores whether current challenges are best addressed through new formats, or through innovation and improvement within existing ones.

Topics for discussion include:
- What are the most pressing problems facing immersive music today?
- Do emerging formats solve these problems, or risk fragmenting production, distribution, and listening experiences?
- How does format uncertainty affect investment, release strategies, and creative willingness, especially in smaller markets?
- What are the potential consequences if industry stakeholders decide that immersive music is too complex or too risky to prioritise?
- How do issues such as translation between loudspeaker-based and headphone listening fit into this broader picture?

The session is designed as an open, moderated discussion with panelists from production, research, mastering, education, and technology development.

Headphones have become the dominant device for music
playback, and their design appears to have reached a
certain level of technical maturity. This workshop presents
an overview of the current state of the art in headphone
design and examines potential directions for future
technological development, addressing both acoustic
aspects—including transducer design—and signal-processing
approaches.

The workshop establishes a common foundation by introducing
the fundamentals of headphone acoustics and design
principles, together with a brief overview of the
historical development of headphones and the main headphone
types in use today.

Based on this foundation, the workshop addresses current
challenges and future development potential in headphone
technology, including:
• Transducer and acoustic development potential: materials,
design methodologies and simulation techniques, and
advances in measurement technology
• Characteristics of a high-quality headphone: What
differentiates an excellent headphone from a good one? To
what extent can headphone performance be characterized
using current measurement techniques, and what additional
metrics, target criteria, or perceptual considerations may
be required? What is the role of mechanical quality?
• Signal processing potential: from advanced noise
cancellation and augmented hearing to spatial audio
processing
• Challenges in realistic spatial reproduction: interaction
between auditory and visual environments
• Emerging wireless technologies: technologies such as UWB
and Bluetooth 6 offer not only increased bandwidth and
reduced latency but also the capability to localize the
playback device. What are the implications for conventional
headphone performance and for spatial audio applications?
• Changes in studio workflows: professional practice has
evolved from loudspeakers as the primary monitoring tools,
with headphones mainly used for detailed analysis, toward
headphones playing a central role in the early stages of
recording and mixing. What are the consequences of this
shift for headphone design and signal processing?
• Technically feasible but not yet commercialized
solutions: advanced headphone concepts that are achievable
with current technology but have not yet been adopted due
to economic or practical constraints

Streaming of immersive audio is known to western audiences
almost exclusively in the object-based format, Atmos,
developed by Dolby and employing lossy codecs to limit bit
rates. Other object-based formats like Sony 360 have had
limited success, and until recently there were no channel
based streamed versions. But this situation is changing,
as it has already done in Japan.

Responding to growing interest in very high quality
immersive music for both on-demand streaming and live
broadcast, two new services are now active that offer,
first, channel-based audio and second, audio streamed in
high res PCM. Binaural mixes, a range of PCM formats and
video are variously included, with extensions to portables,
loudspeakers, and home theater.

This workshop provides a forum for discussion of both the
genuine promise and the challenges in these new
initiatives. Included are the advantages of high
resolution over lossy; channel-based versus object-based;
the degree of adoption of transducers for multichannel;
adaptive bit rates; data sources; and the Japanese
approach; amongst others.

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Eclipsa Audio, based on the Immersive Audio Model and
Format (IAMF) specification developed by members of the
Alliance for Open Media, represents an open and
royalty-free approach to immersive audio creation and
delivery. Eclipsa Audio provides a growing ecosystem for
producing and distributing spatial audio content, with
hardware integration and streaming platform support,
including YouTube, actively being rolled out. This panel
brings together practitioners, researchers, and engineers
directly involved in the development of IAMF and Eclipsa
Audio to inform the audio engineering community about the
current state of the format and its evolving toolkit.
Presenters will provide an overview of the specification's
design principles, discuss the collaborative research and
development effort behind the Open Audio Renderer (OAR) and
Open Audio Codec (OAC), introduce the content creation
tools currently available within the Eclipsa Audio
ecosystem, and propose practical workflows for immersive
audio production and delivery. The session will include
presentations followed by an open discussion addressing
format interoperability, integration with existing
production environments, listener experience
considerations, and future directions for development.
Audience participation is encouraged.

Audio engineering often implicitly assumes a uniformity in
hearing across listeners; this is an assumption that does
not reflect real-world diversity. How could technologies
and practices in production, mixing, and reproduction be
adapted to create music that is more inclusive? While the
AES has a conference series on Audio and Music Induced
Hearing Disorders, this has focused on the causes of
hearing loss with little on audio engineering for listeners
who have a hearing loss.

In western countries, about one in three adults are deaf,
have hearing loss or suffer from tinnitus. Hearing loss can
lead to many challenges with music such as: inaudibility of
quieter passages, distortion, degraded pitch perception,
and difficulty in identifying and picking out lyrics and
instruments. The most common intervention for mild to
moderately severe hearing loss is hearing aids. But while
many of these devices have music programs, their efficacy
is mixed, to the point that many opt not to use them. With
the rise of machine learning within Audio Engineering,
there are opportunities to better personalise music, and
therefore address issues listeners face. Consumer devices
are also increasingly having audio accessibility features
added, but the usefulness of these lack independent
testing. This workshop will consider opportunities for
making music more accessible.

The workshop will start by exploring how hearing loss harms
the experience of listening to music and how this varies
between people. This will lead to discussion of why no
technology can fully ‘correct’ music to achieve a ‘perfect’
listening experience for those with hearing loss. There is
no technology to recreate a ‘golden-ears’ experience. This
leads to a key research question: what is the best,
rendition of a piece of music for someone who has hearing
loss? What do listeners want from music, and how can we get
closest to achieving that?

We will bring in findings from research projects and
listening tests to explore what is known, and also to
highlight that there are significant gaps in knowledge that
require further research. We will then explore
state-of-the-art in wearables such as hearing aids and
sound reproduction systems. This will include the current
Cadenza project, which has been running a series of machine
learning challenges to improve music for those with hearing
loss.

Throughout, we will encourage questions and engagement from
delegates. We want to hear about lived experience of
hearing difference and how that has changed professional
practice and personal lives. We are also keen to hear
suggestions from delegates on what approaches might be used
to improve music for those with hearing loss.

We aim to raise awareness of the importance of considering
diverse audiences in Audio Engineering practice. Where
possible, the workshop will provide practical guidance for
audio engineers, highlighting techniques and emerging
technologies that can better support listeners with diverse
hearing profiles.

The Workshop will be organised by the Cadenza Project Team
https://cadenzachallenge.org/ A large UK-funded project
about improving music for those with hearing loss.