Brandenburg Labs has introduced the Okeanos Pro, a new set of high-end headphones aimed at professional audio engineers and researchers seeking to recreate studio-grade sound environments without building physical multi-speaker rooms.
Priced at about €5,000 ($5,871), the Okeanos Pro can simulate up to 16 virtual speakers placed anywhere in a 360-degree space, using head tracking to adjust audio positioning in real time. The company says the system is designed to replicate professional music studios and complex surround sound layouts. Brandenburg Labs said the headphones are intended to “reproduce a professional sound studio environment” through virtualized speaker configurations.
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The system uses an HTC Vive Tracker 3.0 to enable six degrees of freedom head tracking, allowing sound sources to remain fixed in space as the listener moves. Virtual speaker formats can be switched through a web-based interface on the connected computer, which handles the signal processing required for the spatial audio simulation.
The Okeanos Pro supports ultra-low latency connections to studio audio networks via AES67, Dante and Ravenna, with binaural audio latency as low as 10 milliseconds. The headphones currently support up to 32-bit, 48 kHz audio, with higher-resolution 96 kHz support planned in a future update.
For custom studio reproduction, Brandenburg Labs allows users to measure the directivity transfer function of physical speakers and import that data into the virtualization software. The company said the headphones can be ordered directly, with delivery expected in about a month, positioning the product as a premium alternative to building or maintaining physical surround sound studios.
Source: Brandenburg Labs