Ginger Audio Sphere v2

Screen 1: Sphere 2’s main screen

Whether you’re mixing or mastering in stereo, surround or immersive formats, this powerful virtual monitor controller could soon become indispensable.

The term ‘monitor controller’ used to refer to a hardware box that sat on your desk and provided volume control, output selection, some channel matrix options, a headphone socket or two, and maybe a talkback mic. But although hardware monitor controllers are still very much ‘a thing’, monitor control has also moved into the software realm. When paired with a suitable audio interface, software can offer all the same functionality — including, if you add an external controller, a big volume knob.

Ginger Audio’s Sphere 2, though, offers much more besides. In this review I’ll be focusing on the Immersive edition, but Stereo (2.0, 2.1) and Surround editions are available for a lower price, offering most of the same features but being constrained in terms of channel formats. All three editions are available via subscription, or you can pay once for a perpetual licence.

Sphere is a standalone macOS app that sits between the computer’s audio apps (a DAW or Apple Music, for example) and the audio interface’s outputs. When describing the full scope of its features and functionality, it’s tempting to resort to the cliché that it would be easier to list the things it doesn’t do. That’s because almost the first thing to strike you on launching Sphere is just how much it brings to the monitor control function. So steel yourself — there’s a lot to take in if we’re to explore Sphere in detail!

Key Functions

The first thing to note is that Sphere Immersive offers not only 12 multi‑channel virtual outputs (that can be fed to an audio interface’s outputs) but also eight virtual multi‑channel inputs. You can (as I did) have a Dolby Atmos input from Apple Music routed to one Sphere 2 input and another routed from Pro Tools, or the Dolby Atmos Renderer app. These inputs comprised 7.1.4 Atmos streams in my case but can range from mono all the way up to 9.1.6. The same variety of channel formats is available on each of the 12 outputs, but along with offering channel formats that simply reflect the inputs (which will mean, for example, that a stereo output from an Atmos input will comprise just the front left and right), outputs 5 to 12 can additionally comprise downmixes to various formats, including Apple Spatial binaural.

This is particularly significant in the world of Atmos music mixing because, until recently, the processing that an Atmos mix undergoes when submitted to Apple before it’s made available in binaural stereo on Apple Music was something of a mystery. It would sound somewhat different from a binaural downmix created using the Dolby Atmos Renderer, and this resulted in Atmos mix and mastering engineers berating Apple for, effectively, messing with their work. Apple have now made the Apple Spatial binaural processing algorithms available to developers, so Sphere isn’t the only route by which Apple Spatial binaural can be auditioned while mixing or mastering, but it is a great facility to have, and along with the Apple Spatial binaural downmix, Sphere offers personal HRTF and head‑tracking integration.

You simply send the client a Sphere 2 streaming link and they can listen, in real time, from pretty much anywhere that has a reasonable Internet connection.

Somewhat unexpected to me was that Sphere is able to connect with multiple audio interfaces simultaneously — this feature appears to be aimed at users who perhaps want to get into Atmos mixing but don’t yet possess a single interface with an adequate output count. A further unexpected feature is the incorporation of Ginger Audio’s Authentic Audio network streaming technology. An output can be selected and bussed to Sphere’s streaming module, where it can be downmixed if required and made available as a stream (with or without video) that remote users can access in a web browser...