Immersive Talk with Vaudeville

Can you tell our readers a little about yourselves?

My name is Mirko Vogel, and I'm the managing partner of Vaudeville and lead our company’s immersive work across the globe.

As long as I can remember, I've been obsessed with sound. I started as many of us do in music, from playing in bands, to becoming a recording engineer and FOH engineer, and went on to become a production manager and designer. The transition to Sound Design happened when I moved from Australia to London in 2012, and from there my love for sound intertwined with picture – and the complement of the two senses.

And my name is Miguel Araujo. I 'm the lead sound supervisor re-recording mixer at Vaudeville Vancouver.

I started in advertising in South Africa. While I was drawn to the social aspects, I wished to express my creativity over longer content. After moving to Canada, I dove into recording on-set ADR and working on independent feature films, where I collaborated with A-list talent and teams from Warner Brothers, Formosa Group, Sony and Universal. The next three years saw me move up into supervising and mixing for film and tv projects – and working for Vaudeville. I now spend my days supervising and mixing our traditional linear content as well as leading the creative sound work for immersive content. I’m especially excited by the evolution of storytelling through sound and how emerging technologies like XR and spatial computing open up entirely new creative frontiers, allowing us to craft sound experiences that are deeply felt.

What can you tell us about your studio?

I opened Vaudeville Sound in Canada together with my business partners Daniel Jones and Rob Calder in 2020, and we quickly grew the company here with a focus on animation as well as high resolution immersive content. Vancouver is home to many amazing animation studios.

Our first big project started in late 2020 when we developed the world's largest immersive audio asset catalog for Shutterstock. This project enabled us to scale out studio operations and staffing to accommodate complex immersive production pipelines and has set the stage for everything else we have worked on since.

Can you give an overview of the key equipment you use in the studio?

For most projects we work in Avid Pro Tools or Resolve, depending on the client and project needs. Much of our video game and asset creation work includes Reaper as the main DAW as well. Our studios run Avid S1s or S3s, as well as Avid MTRX interfaces. Of course, all our monitors are Genelecs, which has been vital in helping us build this incredibly flexible immersive audio pipeline that we can ensure will translate across all our territories.

What type of work do you focus on in your studio?

Our studio focuses primarily on high resolution immersive audio content, as well as animation and features for streaming, cinema, experiential and XR applications. We live and love to work with anything that has immersion at the centre of the experience.

Our immersive content often moves between all our global operations depending on the requirements. Most immersive projects have their nexus point at our Vancouver location, which has 9.1.4, 7.1.4 and 5.1 studios, as well as a dedicated foley studio and ADR stage. It also has a large open plan office and editing space to help house our teams and projects.

Moving on, we either finish projects here or work in tight synchronization and collaboration with our UK or US studios that have mirrored studio and monitor setups for full project interoperability and client flexibility.

Is there a particular Immersive format you specialise in?

We started most of our work in Dolby Atmos, but quickly expanded to specialize in Ambisonics, especially for XR applications. This work led to our creative launch partnership with Google and Samsung for their new Eclipsa Audio format at CES 2024 and 2025.

We have also worked extensively in other yet-to-be-announced immersive audio formats, which we can’t say too much about here, but are very excited to be part of the community of audio developers pushing the boundaries of sound with six degrees of freedom.

How and when did you become interested in immersive audio?

To me, sound has always been an immersive experience. The first time I listened to a binaural recording – over 20 years ago – I knew that eventually this would be the future of where I'd go with sound. Over time, the technology and reproduction systems just got better and better. From Atmos to Eclipsa, as well as game engines, the ability for us to render more and more accurate immersive audio content has continued to drive our interest and investments.

When did you start equipping for immersive?

Vaudeville completed its first Dolby Atmos stage at our UK offices in 2010. Since then, 9.1.4 immersive configurations have been the de-facto build for all our rooms. Our Vancouver studios were 9.1.4 by design. This design is a mirror of our UK facilities in Shoreditch, London, to enable all types of work to pass between studio locations with full sonic interoperability.

Can you describe how you approach your immersive work?

Absolutely. The best person to tell you about this process is our Sound Supervisor here, Miguel Araujo.

Traditional film and tv work, while immersive, is still driven by LCR. In fact, a huge amount of the story comes from the single C channel. Moving too many things around can feel distracting and doesn't positively drive the story. This, of course, depends on the type of story.

With immersive 3D formats, like XR and spatial computing, our approach to sound shifts dramatically. These allow the viewer to look and move freely in every direction, sometimes with complete six degrees of freedom. As a result, sound becomes a key part of world-building, not just in terms of coverage, but in how precisely each element is placed within the space. Every sound must live intentionally, anchored to a viewpoint or moving dynamically through it.

Ambisonics allows us to sculpt a spherical field, giving sound the ability to wrap around the listener – mirroring the real world. Whether captured natively or shaped in post-production, the interplay between speaker phase and spatial placement becomes critical. This means sound choices must be made thoughtfully from the very beginning. It’s therefore essential that our editors understand and work natively in the immersive tool set to be able to understand how the final soundtrack is going to come together and how the relationship between each element in the field fits together in context of the whole.

Working in groundbreaking technologies also means that the creators of the stories are often very open to trying new things. On a project we recently finished with an immersive music mix, we positioned the stems in a way that invites you to move around on your chair and experience the song in different ways depending on which way you face. Seeing the artist turn around with their eyes closed, smiling from ear to ear as they experienced their track in a new way is why we will continue to push the boundaries of immersive.

Can you tell us about your Genelec monitoring system?

Our studios all use Genelec 8340s within 9.1.4 system configurations. Our brand-new Culver City studios site uses Genelec The Ones – also in 9.1.4 – which we are super happy with. Monitoring is controlled via the DADman and EUCON with custom system configuration control via StreamDecks.

Vaudeville’s use of Genelec audio monitoring dates back almost 20 years. I think we have almost 150 Genelecs between all our main facilities and embedded studios. This all started when our co-founder Daniel Jones was looking for a studio monitor that would enable the greatest interoperability between the edit and sound finishing. Genelecs are the only monitors we use that empower our teams to create without ever having to think how well something might translate. When we engineer on Genelec monitors we just know with absolute certainty that what we are creating will be heard exactly the way we intended.

Did you use GLM (Genelec Loudspeaker Manager) to calibrate your system?

The GLM system has been a game changer for us. Not only does the calibration stand up to anything else we have tried, the sound stage and controllability we get with GLM is exactly what we need. We rely on GLM for the calibration of all our new rooms. It's simple, easy to use and rock solid.

How has business been for immersive audio recently?

Focusing our work on the immersive space has been artistically interesting and extremely positive from a business perspective. The Sound Asset work we did with Shutterstock is still a standout achievement for us, with over 60,000 assets, including Ambisonic and 5.1 content. We are super proud of the work we did together with Google for the launch of Eclipsa Audio, both in home entertainment as well as in vehicles. The Immersive content we have worked on for the AVP together with Atlantic Productions (Adventure Series) has been an absolute highlight of our careers, and there is so much more where that came from.

On the animation front we recently completed Season 3 of the Lego DreamZzz series, as well as Lego Monkie Kid, and we are currently working on the Marvel Series: Iron man and his Awesome Friends. While not in Atmos, these shows are always pushing the immersion in 5.1 way beyond the norms of the genre, which we are incredibly proud of.

How do you see the future of immersive audio over the next few years?

There are some amazing technologies coming online in the next few years. Some of which are public and some of which are in development. We can’t talk too much about our development projects, but Eclipsa Audio I think will be a game changer for the creator economy and really democratises access and playback like nothing else. We are very excited about what's happening in the XR space, especially with more manufacturers delivering XR device ecosystems, from AR glasses to Spatial Computers like the Vision Pro. It feels like we are just scratching the surface of where we can go, and I'm beyond proud that our company is at the forefront of the R&D, technology and creative development with so many amazing content and product partners.

To find out more about Vaudeville, click here

Don't miss the Headliner Podcast featuring Vaudeville:

Do you want to be featured in our ‘Immersive Talk’ series? If so, just post some pictures of your setup on Instagram using the #GenelecImmersive hashtag. We’ll be keeping a look out for the most interesting setups, so who knows? We may be in touch with you!