AREAL Dr ive n b y a p a s s i o n t o make spa tial audio more ac c e ssible, fr eelan ce s y s t e m t e c h n i c i a n a n d f ront of h ouse e ng ine e r Pie te r Doms cofoun d e d Ar e a l , a n e w pro a udio bra nd de dic ate d to lowe ri n g the ba rr i e r s t o i m m e r s i ve sound. H e re h e disc usse s th e g e ne sis of the comp a n y a n d h o w i t pla ns to bring spa tial audio c a pabilities to ven u es with m o r e t h a n a n L - R sound syste m.
Areal will be a new name for many people. Can you tell us a little bit about the company and how you got started? Pieter Doms: Areal was started by two audio engineers, Arno Voortman and myself. We were both involved as freelancers with the Tomorrowland EDM festival in Belgium. We have always embraced new technologies and we wanted to find ways to create audio experiences that could match the amazing immersive visual and emotional spectacle that Tomorrowland is famous for. So, in 2018 we began working with immersive processors, but the challenge was that DJs were providing stereo feeds and the immersive systems needed dedicated spatial content. After trialling and rejecting every off-the-shelf upmixing solution we could find to get over this hurdle, we decided to make our own, and that was really the spark for Areal. The project gathered momentum during the Covid lockdowns when we spent countless hours developing the technology. Since 2022, we have used successive prototypes of the Upmix Engine at every Tomorrowland festival, right up to 2025 when we had them running on nine separate stages. Our interest has broadened to other aspects of spatial audio, but everything we do is about making immersive audio more accessible. Of course, as the company matures, we have brought in expertise to evolve our
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concepts into fully developed, manufactured and supported products, but the core mission stays the same. The Upmix Engine was recently launched as your first commercial product. In simple terms, what is its role and how is it different from other solutions on the market? Pieter Doms: Put simply, the Upmix Engine converts stereo audio to multichannel output in real time. The RISE algorithm decorrelates the signals from each other, so what gets sent to each output is spectrally unique. When this is played back over multiple speakers, you get a spatial listening experience from that stereo signal. Normally, if you have several speakers in the same room playing identical signals, your brain instinctively tries to pinpoint the source of the sound, but using the Upmix Engine, the output from each speaker is different, and because all the speakers now acoustically combine, you perceive the sound as naturally distributed across multiple sources, which is more pleasant and less fatiguing for the listener. What sets the Upmix Engine apart is that it was designed for live performance. Other upmixing solutions have a latency well above 10 milliseconds, so they are just not acceptable for live situations. Also, we are not introducing reverb or phase rotations into the