APL - Applied Psychoacoustics Laboratory

30/04/2026

🚀 We’re excited to announce the release of APL VIRTUOSO v2.3, featuring the new 2L Mastering Room preset, created in collaboration with Morten Lindberg, multi-Grammy-winning engineer and founder of 2L.

🎧 This new preset brings one of the world’s most refined immersive mastering environments to headphones, enabling highly accurate binaural monitoring, quality control, and immersive music listening with the spatial character of Morten’s room. Find out more via the links in the comments.

🏷️ VIRTUOSO and VIRTUOSO Lite are now on Spring Sale until 31 May. Get up to 50% off and experience professional binaural monitoring, immersive music listening, and the new 2L Mastering Room preset in VIRTUOSO v2.3.

We’re also offering an exclusive APL x 2L offer: VIRTUOSO and VIRTUOSO Lite customers get 20% off 2L ADM files and other products from the 2L Music Store. Experience Morten Lindberg’s award-winning immersive recordings in true master-quality form, reproduced through the 2L Mastering Room in VIRTUOSO.

VIRTUOSO users also benefit from APL HeadTrek, our free camera-based head tracking app for VIRTUOSO users. Using a standard we**am or built-in camera, HeadTrek enables more realistic binaural listening, with enhanced externalisation and more accurate localisation.

14/03/2026

Our new paper on SSIR has been published in Applied Acoustics (Open Access. Link in the comment). SSIR (Spatial Segmentation of Impulse Response) builds on the Spatial Decomposition Method (SDM) and provides a more compact spatial representation of the sound field, enabling more efficient auralisation. This work is part of Alan Pawlak's PhD project, supervised by Prof Hyunkook Lee and funded by Genelec Oy and the University of Huddersfield. Special thanks to Aki Mäkivirta, Thomas Lund and Siamäk Naghian of Genelec for their support throughout this project.

09/03/2026

Our new paper has been published in this month's issue of the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society (links in the comments). This work from Miki Morinaga's Masters by Research project, supervised by Prof Hyunkook Lee at APL, identifies salient perceptual attributes of 3D microphone arrays and shows that the off-centre listening positions in immersive audio playback can lead to greater variations in the perceived differences among the arrays. Tonal attributes such as clarity, fullness,and brightness were found to be particularly salient in off-centre positions.

This paper forms Part 2 of the 3D Microphone Array Comparison (3D-MARCo) research series. Part 1 focused on objective measurements of the arrays, which provide theoretical explanations for some of the findings reported in this paper. Since the 3D-MARCo open-access database of high-quality 3D mic array recordings was published in 2019, it has been downloaded 43,000 times, and has generated numerous academic and industrial impacts, helping engineers, educators, students and researchers learn how to capture 3D sounds, and more broadly, how to listen to and evaluate spatial audio. The journey is still continuing, inspiring our sister ECHO-Project as well as other spatial audio and AI research projects. Part 3 will come one day.

21/02/2026

Read this Production Expert article and learn how renowned engineers Bob Katz (Digital Domain), Stefan Bock (MSM Studios) and Alex Venguer (Power Station) are using APL DUOPAN to take their mixes to the next level.

Offering extra ways to convey spatial information, DUOPAN lets engineers combine time and level to paint the panorama. Here industry big hitter Bob Katz, Stephan Bock, and Alejandro Venguer share why they choose DUOPAN for pleasing perspectives.

24/12/2025

Have an Immersive Christmas, everyone!

23/12/2025

Save up to 67% on VIRTUOSO v2 this holiday season. Offer ends Jan 2nd - Don't miss out! Transform your headphones into a world-class immersive mix studio with the most powerful binaural monitoring tool and mix with confidence wherever you are!

“I absolutely recommend VIRTUOSO for mixing engineers who do not have a good listening room. Using VIRTUOSO, I got a sense of height and rear localization that is far better than other binaural systems I have tried." - Bob Katz

https://apl-hud.com/product/virtuoso/

11/12/2025

Curious about what our psychoacoustic panner DUOPAN has to offer? Check out this article.

Huge thanks to Production Expert for the article, and to the amazing, world-class engineers Morten Lindberg, Emre Ramazanoglu, Hans-Martin Buff, and Justin Gray for sharing their real-world experiences with DUOPAN and its creative potential. 🙌

With so many engineers falling back on conventional level-based panning for the mix, we could be missing out on something more. Here pros talk about how APL’s advanced imaging tool can improve the vista for any mix.

27/11/2025

We are absolutely thrilled that VIRTUOSO v2 has been nominated for the prestigious Sound On Sound (SOS) Awards 2026!🏆 This nomination means the world to our team, but now we need your help to bring home the win. If VIRTUOSO has served you well in creating better immersive music, please consider casting your vote for us.

Every single vote counts. We really appreciate your incredible support! ❤️

The voting link is in the comment. Voting closes at 23:59 PST on 30th November 2025

25/11/2025

We are delighted that APL VIRTUOSO v2 has been selected as a Gear of the Year in the Software category by the prestigious Sound on Sound magazine. Links for the full review by SOS are in the comments. VIRTUOSO is currently on Black Friday Sales. https://apl-hud.com/product/virtuoso/ Experience the ultimate in precision binaural monitoring yourself.

11/10/2025

Full tutorial/audio demo of APL DUOPAN

Introducing APL DUOPAN — a new psychoacoustic panner designed to bring natural spatial depth and balance to your stereo mixes, optimised for headphone listen...