Field Notes

Immersive audio in Latin America doesn’t fail due to a lack of talent or technology. It fails because validation processes, monitoring, and workflows were never designed for our context. I recently launched an ongoing, targeted survey focused on active immersive audio practitioners across LATAM to map how technical decisions are validated under real world conditions.This article presents an initial diagnosis based on 32 specialized respondents. While the data collection remains open, the high recurrence of specific workflows, infrastructure constraints, and technical frictions already reveals robust and consistent patterns that define the regional landscape.The data confirms that working with immersive audio in LATAM is, above all, an act of technical resistance: The Validation Limbo: 50% of professionals access a physical room less than once a year. This forces them to rely on visual indicators rather than what they actually hear, because generic binaural doesn’t convey spatiality clearly.The mix stops being an aesthetic choice and becomes a metadata validation exercise.The Fragility of the Ecosystem: Immersive audio infrastructure in LATAM is a house of cards. We rely on virtual bridges, precarious routings, and unstable platforms. Every session is at risk, and professionals lose 20% of their workday just maintaining the infrastructure; time that should be spent experimenting, designing, and creating.The HRTF Veil: Working with generic HRTFs is like wearing someone else’s glasses. Without personalization or head tracking, spatial perception becomes inaccurate and causes cognitive fatigue. The result: conservative decisions and excessive technical processing to force spatiality that the system can’t properly validate.I’m not speaking from theory, but from what I see every day in the infrastructure we work with in LATAM. This isn’t opinion; it’s a diagnosis of how the system actually functions.When validation frameworks are fragile, technical decisions become undefendable. And what can’t be defended, can’t scale. Many confuse trying something with truly validating it. The professional’s insecurity doesn’t come from a lack of knowledge; it’s the logical response to tools that were never designed for their reality. “I worked in a dome with a 93.5-channel audio system. When I finally tested it in the space, the distance sounded very low, both front and back. The hardest part was identifying which direction was ‘front’ for them.” The Validation Limbo In Latin America, many immersive audio artists and professionals work almost exclusively in their own studios, often gaining access to the final presentation space only two or three times before the premiere. This creates a critical problem; how to validate that what they mix in the studio will actually sound as expected in the final experience.Much of the production is done using generic binaural rendering, designed to simulate spatiality through headphones. Outside of an environment with calibrated references, these engines lose resolution and accuracy.Without that reference, hearing is replaced by sight; professionals rely on software graphics and panner indicators to decide if something “sounds right”. They mix not what they hear, but what the interface promises is happening.This disconnection between physical and virtual space gives rise to what we call sensory substitution; in the absence of a clear acoustic reference, critical auditory judgment shifts to interpreting metadata on the screen. Certainty that an object is correctly positioned no longer comes from auditory experience but depends on technical faith that the software is rendering the interface correctly.This dynamic represents a transfer of authority, where human judgment is subordinated to the algorithm. Under this “acoustic myopia” imposed by generic binaural, mixing becomes a data management exercise: visual coherence is prioritized over aesthetic intent, sacrificing sonic experimentation in favor of a technical safety that exists only in the graphical plane of the workstation. The Fragility of the Ecosystem This fragility is a statistical reality that divides the community. While a specific segment manages to maintain a stable workflow, the data reveals a profound technical gap: 42.8% of survey respondents describe their routing configuration as a persistent struggle, ranging from moderate to highly difficult. In this context, 64.3% of professionals choose Reaper not merely as a creative preference, but as a technical survival strategy. In an environment where nearly half the community faces routing conflicts, the flexibility of this DAW becomes the only guarantee of stability against the lack of native routing protocols in the operating system.For those operating without dedicated hardware or high-count physical outputs, relying on software bridges like VB-Audio, ASIO Link, or virtual patchbays means working without technical determinism, the assurance that the system will respond identically at every startup. This systemic instability imposes a creative tax. The fear of breaking a precarious routing setup inhibits innovation; the risk of a technical failure often translates into a lost workday. In LATAM, configuring an immersive working environment is, above all, a continuous exercise in risk management. The HRTF Veil This psychoacoustic myopia manifests as a technical contradiction that the survey clearly reveals. Although 57.1% of professionals use spatialization tools primarily for their ease of use, many report critical difficulties in accurately perceiving elevation and distance.The issue does not lie solely in the software itself, but in the imposition of an average statistical model onto individual physiology. Operating without personalized HRTF profiles or head tracking systems, the brain enters a state of auditory asynchrony; a dissonance between what the visual interface indicates and what the cognitive system is able to decode.This condition is compounded by a revealing finding from the survey: most users do not have clear information about the HRTF they are actually using. References such as the Neumann KU100 remain abstract for professionals working with panning plugins, precisely because they lack access to the original microphone or to the physical experience of that capture.The disconnection deepens further because access to tools for generating an individual HRTF is almost nonexistent for the average user. There are no simple workflows that allow engineers to capture their own acoustic biometrics. As a result, professionals are forced to work with borrowed hearing. Without knowing which filter is being applied to their own perception, they lose control over the sonic translation chain.This lack of transparency is aggravated by a systemic absence of standards. There are currently no unified protocols or clear formats that define how localization inconsistencies along the elevation and distance axes should be resolved within binaural systems.While the horizontal plane enjoys a relative level of technical maturity, spatial decisions outside that plane lack a shared reference framework.Above and below positions remain in a gray zone where each manufacturer applies proprietary, closed algorithms. The Technical Cost of Lacking Standards When observing these patterns, three critical points emerge that help explain the uncertainty many professionals report regarding spatial accuracy.Inconsistency Between Rendering Engines:This problem becomes evident in the lack of consistency between different rendering engines, particularly when professionals must migrate projects due to distribution or compatibility requirements. Although metadata standards such as ADM define where an object is located, there is no shared reference for how it should sound. As a result, the same object can vary in position or timbral character depending on the engine used, forcing the engineer to compensate for system induced deviations rather than making creative decisions. The solution does not lie in modifying algorithms, but in developing shared translation and validation protocols that restore predictability to the workflow without imposing technological homogenization.The Complexity of the SOFA Standard and the Customization Barrier:Although the Spatially Oriented Format for Acoustics exists to universalize HRTFs, its commercial implementation remains limited and unintuitive. The survey reveals widespread unawareness of which profile is being used, compounded by the lack of accessible tools for the average user to generate their own acoustic biometrics. This absence of simple capture methods and direct loading protocols within DAWs perpetuates the use of unknown generic profiles, forcing professionals to work with an чуж foreign auditory morphology that does not represent their actual hearing.The Cone of Confusion and the Absence of Spectral Emphasis:This phenomenon intensifies when the HRTF is inaccurate, causing the brain to confuse frontal sounds with rear ones, or upper with lower, by failing to recognize the filtering cues specific to its own morphology.The survey confirms this drift: in the absence of standards defining how algorithms should treat critical frequency bands (Blauert bands) to distinguish verticality over generic headphones, professionals often resort to excessive reverberation to force a sense of spatiality that the system does not inherently guarantee.One possible technical path forward would be the implementation of dynamic spectral emphasis protocols based on more precise statistical averages, or “supporting psychoacoustic cues” that act as reinforcement when a personalized HRTF is not available. Standardizing these reinforcements across rendering engines could reduce cognitive fatigue and restore predictability to the vertical dimension without relying exclusively on perfect acoustic biometrics. Beyond the First Layer This article is not a conclusion; it is a first cut.The data presented here reflects only an initial layer of the survey and focuses on the most visible structural failures: validation, infrastructure fragility, and psychoacoustic uncertainty. Other dimensions remain to be analyzed, including monitoring strategies, educational gaps, distribution constraints, and the economic cost of operating without standards.What already emerges with clarity is that immersive audio in LATAM is not failing at the level of creativity or expertise, but at the level of system design. Professionals are making decisions inside frameworks that do not allow those decisions to be properly validated, defended, or transferred.Until validation is treated as an infrastructural problem rather than an individual responsibility, immersive audio in the region will continue to depend on technical intuition, visual proxies, and personal tolerance to uncertainty. This survey does not aim to offer quick fixes, but to name the problem precisely. Only from that clarity can meaningful structural solutions begin to exist.Further analysis and findings from the survey will follow.

Field Notes

Immersive audio in LATAM doesn’t have a talent problem. It has a systemic design problem.

Sol Rezza

Hablemos

works@solrezza.net