Neumann RIME

Not everyone can afford a 7.1.4 Neumann speaker setup, but perhaps RIME is the next best thing?

If you want to mix Atmos or another immersive music format ‘properly’, the barrier to entry is high. You’ll need a double‑figure number of high‑end studio monitors, an interface that can handle complex calibration setups, and a room that is extremely well behaved acoustically. The cost of cabling and speaker mounting alone can exceed what many of us would want to spend on an entire stereo monitoring setup.

This being the case, it’s not surprising that there are many products intended to let you mix immersive audio on headphones. In the pages of SOS, for example, we’ve already covered Embody’s Immerse Virtual Studio Signature Edition, Genelec’s AuralID and APL’s Virtuoso (as well as packages like Slate VSX and Acustica Sienna that do the same in stereo). The latest company to enter the fray are Neumann, with something they call Reference Immersive Monitoring Environment, or RIME for short.

RIMEs Of Goodbye

Neumann have long been part of the Sennheiser group, and one of their stablemates until recently was a company called Dear Reality, who were responsible for one of the earliest attempts to translate immersive monitoring onto headphones, with a product called dearVR Monitor. Sennheiser closed down Dear Reality earlier this year, and several of their engineers were hired by Neumann to assist with RIME development. However, RIME is a wholly new product, which is not based on the dearVR Monitor code, and which actually embodies a different design philosophy.

Products such as dearVR Monitor and AuralID use mathematical methods such as ray‑tracing to model the way in which sound coming from multiple point sources impinges on the ears. Some, like APL Virtuoso, add a modelled virtual room environment, but what you’re hearing on your headphones is always an idealised setup rather than one drawn from real life. By contrast, products like Immerse Virtual Studio and Sienna attempt to recreate the experience of being in a specific, real‑world immersive mixing room. This is achieved by capturing impulse responses at the listening position.

Rather than travel the world measuring other people’s mix spaces, Neumann have chosen to build their own immersive mixing environment and measure that.

It’s this second approach that Neumann have taken with RIME — except that, rather than travel the world measuring other people’s mix spaces, they’ve chosen to build their own immersive mixing environment and measure that. This space, naturally, uses Neumann’s own loudspeakers and MA‑1 calibration system throughout, whilst the impulses were recorded using Neumann’s classic KU100 ‘Fritz’ dummy head.

In principle, both approaches have their own benefits. The fully virtual approach pioneered by Genelec and Dear Reality is infinitely flexible, with endless freedom to change the number and position of sources within the monitoring environment. This is not a trivial advantage, especially in a world where different immersive formats specify different speaker layouts; there are not many real‑world studios that can fully cater to multiple immersive playback specifications. On the other hand, the impulse response approach used in RIME should be...