Lewitt Space Replikator

A tool for improving your mixes

The first software from Austrian microphone manufacturer Lewitt appeared the other day. And God, what a nice debut it was! We take a look at the Lewitt Space Replicator.

Lewitt has previously built both really nice sounding audio interfaces and microphones at really affordable prices. Now they are taking the logical step of trying to help us make our recordings sound as good as possible. Above all, it is about being able to trust that a mix that sounds good in your own studio environment will also sound good in a variety of other acoustic environments. This is where the Space Replicator comes in.

Listen in different environments

To make sure you’ve made a good mix, you should listen to it in a variety of acoustic contexts. How does it sound in really big monitor speakers, on the TV in your living room, on your iPhone or in your car? That’s where Space Replicator can come to our aid. The developers have “sampled” a variety of different venues and playback systems and transferred these to a huge set of virtual rooms and listening systems. To succeed in this, they have developed a special process that can recreate all kinds of listening environments in an incredibly realistic way.

This is primarily intended for those who for some reason have had to make a recording using headphones. Often you find yourself in a situation where it is not possible to listen through monitor speakers. With a pair of well-balanced headphones you can take your listening experience with you, no matter where you end up.

When listening through speakers, there are many factors that affect how you experience the sound. This is of course both about how the speakers are equipped and about the acoustics of the room – the size of the room, how it reacts to sound, absorption, reflection, etc. Where you are in the room also affects the listening experience. Yes, even the physical appearences of the listener can affect the sound.

These factors have now been addressed in Lewitt Space Replicator, and provided you find your headphones among the headphone profiles that Lewitt has created, this system should be able to recreate a variety of virtual listening rooms/systems in a highly illusory way. This should make it much easier in cases where you need to mix, edit, or even master a recording via headphones. It should also work equally well regardless of whether it is a music recording or dialogue and environmental sound for film or broadcast purposes that is to be handled.

Space Replikator

Space Replicator is a stereo plugin that you place on the master bus in your DAW. There it can create the illusion that you are in a variety of different acoustic environments. And this is also adapted for listening in your favorite headphones. In addition to ready-made settings for hundreds of different headphone models, Lewitt promises that new models will be added gradually. You are also encouraged to create your own personal profile to adapt the stereo image to your own preferences. You will then listen to a number of sound samples in pairs in your headphones, and for each pair you should mark the version you prefer. This only takes a minute, and when you are finished you can name your profile, sync it with Lewitt’s software and use it for your listening.

Create your own personal binaural profile!

It is important that you create your own so-called “binaural profile” for your listening.

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If you’re not completely happy with the preset for your own headphones, there’s a setting the developers call “transparent,” which was developed by a listening panel of audio enthusiasts, musicians, sound engineers, and producers. That profile is supposed to be a golden average for how a really good pair of headphones should sound.

What sound environments does the Lewitt Space Replicator offer?

On the one hand, we have Studio A from Lewitt’s research headquarters. For listening, they have custom-built speakers from David Haigner. In Studio B, they instead have a set of near-field speakers with a carefully calibrated subwoofer. White Sea Studio is a professional mixing and mastering studio that has been equipped with a listening system in the form of a LennArt Audio Quasar system. Vienna Synchron Stage Control A is a studio where the sound for countless films has been mixed and mastered. There we find monitors for both midfield and distance listening. In the sister studio Vienna Synchron Stage Control B, they have also handled post-production of countless films, but there the listening system is only a set of midfield monitors.

Here we have moved the mix to the dance floor at the Watergate Club.

In addition to these studios, many other environments are offered. How about a club environment – Watergate Club – where you can listen to their PA system both from the dance floor and from the DJ booth, both when the club is empty and when it is full of people?

This is what our mix sounds like from the back seat of a car.

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With Space Replicator you can also check how the mix sounds in a car stereo, both from the front seats and in the back seat. And in a regular living room, three different smartphones have been recreated, as well as two different laptops. In the kitchen we find two different Bluetooth speakers plus a tablet/iPad and in the TV room we find sound profiles for both the built-in TV speakers and a Soundbar.

Further listening

Much of this is recognizable from some of Lewitt’s competitors on the software side. Waves Audio and IK Multimedia, among others, have created listening profiles that recreate the listening from several well-known recording studios for headphone listeners. Other companies, such as Sonarworks with its Sound ID Reference, have instead focused on calibrating your headphones so that they match your monitor speakers as closely as possible.

Here we listen to our mix in the control room at White Sea Studio.

Lewitt takes this concept a few steps further with Space Replicator. On the one hand, it offers a large number of acoustic environments, and on the other hand, it has calibrated the listening experience for a large number of different headphones. At the time of writing, there are 771 different models! And just to be safe, it has also measured several examples of each headphone model. This way, it can be ensured that each profile matches as well as possible. There is also a “default mode” in the program where no correction is used.

How does it work in practice?

With your favorite headphones on your head and the corresponding preset selected in Space Replicator, you can browse through the different acoustic environments. You can also choose to listen to how your mix would sound on some common consumer headphones. There you will find three different typical over-ear headphones, but there are also a couple of the most common wireless in-ear headphones. If I’m not mistaken, there is a headphone from Sony plus Apple’s AirPod Pro on offer.

We can also choose to enjoy our mix in a pair of regular consumer headphones.

Many early users have testified that they could easily find studio environments in Space Replicator that worked very well for their way of listening – and that they used these for both mixing and mastering. Others alternate between a couple of different sound environments from Space Replicator and listening in their own favorite monitors.

As an alternative to your own monitor speakers, Space Replicator works perfectly. In fact, you often end up in situations where there are no monitors at hand, or where you are forced to use speakers whose sound image you are unfamiliar with.

For me personally – I often use headphones for my main listening in my project studio – I was very impressed with both the diversity of sound environments that Space Replicator offers and the realism that these can reproduce.

Even when it comes to remote collaboration, Lewitt’s Space Replicator can be of great help. If you send a recording to a colleague, you naturally want him to have the same sound experience as the one you created in your studio. As a reference for listening, you can then indicate which of Lewitt’s sound environments you yourself used.

Something that has been of great help to me is Space Replicator’s ability to show how the stereo image from a headphone mix can be expressed in a “real” speaker listening. As a headphone user, you are often far too cowardly when it comes to panning sound sources too far to the right or left. Space Replicator can be of great help here, since listening through speakers does not isolate the two channels in the way that headphones do. Space Replicator is very good at transmitting the feeling of listening through speakers. With headphones alone, you usually have the entire stereo image inside your head. With Space Replicator, it feels like you are listening in front of you.

Conclusion

In order to create a professional mix that works in different contexts, both for music and video production, reliable listening is required. For those who have made a recording/mix with headphones, there is now a well-functioning tool, Lewitt Space Replicator. It offers a generous range of different virtual listening environments. The developers also offer ready-made settings for over 700 different headphone models where you can listen to how your mix would sound in other sound environments. This plug-in is conveniently placed on the master output bus of your recording program or DAW, and there you can then switch between different playback environments, and perhaps also make the corrections that you think are necessary to achieve the perfect mix. With the help of Space Replicator, you can create a mix that you can trust, regardless of where it was made and where it will be played.

Update

Today (November 13) Lewitt released an important update to Space Replicator. Among other things, we find two new acoustic replicas. First, PRST (Praterstrasse), a rock club in Vienna that is known for its impressive PA system, ranked as one of the best in Europe. And secondly, Zwentendorf, the control room from a nuclear power plant that was never put into operation, because Germany sensibly closed down all such things.

Additionally, there are over 100 new headphone profiles in the new update, which is free to download for all owners of the previous version of Space Replicator. This also means that we now have over 800 different headphones represented in the app. Not bad at all!

Link

Here is a short video that shows what Space Replicator can sound like.