Advanced Immersive topics: Beds, LFE, etc

Mixbus’s Immersive Mixing is faster and easier than any other DAW. However, immersive mixing is a complicated topic, and there’s a limit to how simply it can be presented.

You must have a firm knowledge of signal flow, and understand that the immersive path is parallel to the stereo main mix; it doesn’t go through the stereo master channel, mastering, monitoring and export paths. Instead, the surround objects take a parallel path into the surround master bus, where the ‘internal renderer’ generates a file for export, as well as a realtime rendering for speakers and binaural listening.

Where are the ‘beds’ ?

• Mixbus is focused on Music Mixing, so it does not meet the needs of a full “film-style” Atmos implementation with multiple beds, bed groups, music/dialog/fx distinctions, etc.
• Mixbus does not allow you to write any ‘bed’ tracks to the ADM master file: only 118 objects may be added to the ADM file
• For the purposes of channel-count reduction, the 12 stereo mixbuses serve the purpose of stereo beds … each pair can be panned anywhere in the 3d space.
• We do have future plans to implement bed tracks.

Where is the LFE knob?

• The LFE channel is part of a channel-based system and requires a X.1 bed
• As Mixbus does not populate any bed channels in the ADM file, there is no LFE (.1) channel to send an LFE signal to
• In practice, for music, there is rarely any benefit to using an LFE channel … sending bass instruments to the LFE, in addition to the main front speakers, only introduces the possibility for errors in phase or level depending on the listener’s setup.
• It’s important to understand the difference between the LFE channel which is a dedicated channel for low frequency effects in movies, and the Subwoofer speaker output which is generated by your playback system “bass management”. The LFE is fed to the sub if one is available, but it isn’t itself a ‘sub channel’.
• For those reasons, you will not find an LFE knob on the channelstrip panner
• If you want an ‘earthquake’ effect, use any object and pan it to the front center, and optionally increase the ‘size’ to maximum. This will send the low-frequency effect to all speakers equally and in-phase, and the playback system’s “bass management” can effectively reproduce it.

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