Genelec’s Andy Bensley explains the UNIO Audio Monitoring Platform

Andy Bensley, regional business development manager at Genelec, explains the different elements that make up the UNIO Audio Monitoring Platform – which brings together all the benefits of Genelec Smart Active Monitors, GLM 5.0 calibration software and Aural ID 2.0 technology – to create seamless integration between professional in-room loudspeakers and headphone monitoring services.

What is the UNIO Audio Monitoring Platform?

UNIO is an idea that we came up with over the last four or five years, where we’ve begun to add additional services to complement and sit alongside our hardware. As a speaker manufacturer, our bread and butter is the in-room systems, whether that be compact nearfield monitors, right up to some of the largest systems that we manufacture and supply. 

Alongside that, we've had additional pieces of technology in software such as GLM for room optimisation and system optimisation for the loudspeakers. More recently we’ve had Aural ID and GRADE reports, so UNIO is a means to bring all of these together so that customers can cherry pick which of these elements will be helpful for their way of working and what's going to fit into their workflow moving forward. Our plan is to expand those services as time goes on. 

Certainly in the next few months, we're gonna see more elements added to the UNIO platform.

What are your most frequently asked questions about the UNIO Audio Monitoring Platform?

For me, it’s, ‘What's coming up?’ Or, ‘How does Aural ID fit into this?’ Essentially, Aural ID is a host for our high resolution HRTF capture. Anytime that you've used Apple air pods, for example, or different HRTF programmes where you'll scan your ear with your phone, you'll get a snapshot of the shape and dimensions of your ear. The premise of that is to improve the external localisation in an immersive context.

How so?

For example, if you're listening to immersive audio through a streaming service, what we're doing with Aural ID is taking that idea to a much more precise level. We're able to scan the entire torso, head and ears and come up with a render and a HRTF file that is incredibly precise, taking in so many more data points than just a photograph of the ear. The upshot of that is you've got this unique personal headphone experience that ultimately improves the experience of either listening in stereo, or in immersive formats.

What are the biggest challenges with headphone monitoring, and how does Aural ID address those?

When you're listening to loudspeakers in the room, that stereo image is generally in front of you. On headphones, it's to the extremes – to the side of your head – and it feels quite internal. The ultimate goal with Aural ID is to bridge that gap between headphone monitoring and your in-room system. 

There's also an element of calibration that you can go through to neutralise the frequency response of the headphones, but also to be able to dial in the speaker positions, or the virtual speaker positions within the Aural ID application.

The nice thing about that is if you are working in Dolby Atmos, for example, and you're mixing in that format and you have an in-room system, there are specific things about that setup in terms of the locations of the speakers. You're able to tweak that within Aural ID to get those positions to reflect what's going on in the room. So if you take the headphones off, the object should be in the same position. 

That's the ultimate goal. Once you've got that dialled in, you've got your HRTF, so you will be able to do additional work away from your in-room system.

This all sounds quite software-focused for a loudspeaker manufacturer…?

We're not trying to do ourselves out of business in terms of selling fewer speakers! [laughs] But what we are very passionate about is providing a reference. If people do have to work on headphones, then how can we get it to translate to our systems in-room? How can we bridge that experience? 

That's the ultimate goal of this technology; to be able to bridge the gap between in-room and headphone monitoring. That's one of the pillars of UNIO.

The 9320A Reference Controller and UNIO Audio Monitoring Service Platform were unveiled recently at IBC in Amsterdam. What has the feedback been like so far?

The show was excellent for us and the reaction was really positive. We've hit a lot of the marks that customers were looking for in a device like this, because we've had the request for so many years: ‘When are you going to make a GLM controller?’ 

That’s what we were initially looking to offer customers, especially with customers that are working on the GLM platform and working with our smart active loudspeakers: to have a really high quality tactile controller that you could use to control your GLM system, control your monitors in terms of volume, and then basic monitor control functions.

From there, the thought for us was, ‘What else would be useful for customers in terms of their workflow?’ One idea was to create this really high quality output stage, so not only create an audio interface, but create something which was going to be complementary to the rest of our monitors, and specifically, our smart active monitors.

What issues led Genelec to focus on this?

Historically, it's been so difficult to find an AES interface with volume control – for anyone that's plugged up an AES system and just had it run full-scale, it's the scariest thing ever, because it's so loud! It always makes you look like an amateur as well, because it catches you out. So having an AES interface with volume control, where you can predictably and comfortably control your in-room system, is gonna be really useful for a lot of people.

With the 9320A, we wanted to introduce a really high quality output stage for the headphones. We were looking at a reference grade output that would bridge the gap between people working on headphones and working in-room systems. 

There's a few clever things internally with the 9320A that allows you to use it with our Aural ID software. So we've got all of these different strands and technologies that we're trying to string together, and the 9320A is the start of trying to bring all of those technologies together, ultimately, to give customers a reference, either with their in-room system, or headphones.

Was this in response to requests from users?

I think that's reflective of where a lot of people are working now. If they haven't got access to the in-room system, how can we improve the experience on headphones when they're either working away or they're travelling? 

People are working in less than ideal environments; more often than not they're on the go, so we’re trying to work out, ‘How can we fit into that way of working, but also keep the quality as high as possible in terms of the reference?’ And, ‘How can we ensure that that reference is repeatable, whether it's on headphones, or whether it's on an in-room system?’

Working with any DAW and audio interface system, the 9320A – with GLM – can handle an unlimited channel count for SAM Monitoring systems from stereo to immersive; why is this important for modern workflows?

A pain point that we've seen for many customers is, ‘How do you control the level of immersive systems?’ I think, especially in smaller rooms, it can be a real issue, because if you're investing a certain amount of money in the in-room system, then you've got to invest another £2,000-£3,000 pounds in a monitor controller that can control everything within in the room, which can be quite a frustrating place to park your money. 

One of the things that we are very passionate about with the reference controller is to give tactile control to our GLM systems – something that felt substantial and felt really grounded.

With GLM and the Smart Active Monitoring Platform, it's scalable up to 180 speakers if you want it to be, but also, if you've got the audio outputs from your converters and they're feeding the system, as long as you've got enough outputs, you can continue to scale the system by adding speakers. When you connect the control element to the reference controller, you've got control over the entire system.

What was the thinking behind Smart Active Monitoring when it was launched in 2006 and what problems was it solving for the user?

It's wild to think that GLM and our automated calibration system has been around that long because it was a bit of a dark art that people were very suspicious about back then. I remember speaking to acousticians and they were quite sniffy about the fact that there was an automated or an optimisation system built into the monitors. They were like, ‘Well, our rooms are great, we don't need any assistance’.

What we started to see was that people were starting to work in more compromised environments. Jump forward to the pandemic and there were lots of people working at home in the most compromised environments, so the importance of being able to optimise and help these systems in the rooms is really important.

GLM was the start of increasing the precision, increasing the ease of use, (you didn't have to have a third party microphone or software, you didn't have to be able to interpret the data) – it did a lot of the heavy lifting. 

The beauty of it was that the DSP lived in the speaker – there wasn't a central hub where you could run out of channels or run out of available loudspeakers. Because you've got the DSP in the speaker, there isn't a bottleneck in terms of scaling the system, so customers have been able to build on their systems over the years.

We've always said that we're able to be format-agnostic, because there isn't an immersive format that we can't fit into, because we're not limited by the number of outputs on a box, we can just scale the system.

Can you explain how Smart Active Monitors and GLM software work together?

Even at IBC recently, these questions come up all the time, because we can't assume that people are familiar with the need for calibration: ‘Why would they need to calibrate the speaker? It's designed correctly and it should work in the room, right?’ What's important is the marriage between the loudspeakers and the room.

The smart active monitors have DSP internally, which allows them to be optimised to the environment. The main means of optimisation will be level alignment – making sure that the audio is hitting the listening position at the same time as the other loudspeakers, and also being able to take a reference of the loudspeakers’ performance in the room and mitigating some of the room influence.

If you put a loudspeaker against the wall or put it in a corner, you'll typically see a boost in the low end and that can lead to issues in translation in the bass response. By being able to neutralise that you've got a much better chance of projects translating elsewhere. Essentially, the smart active monitors are the hardware side of things and the Genelec loudspeaker management software, GLM, is the interface which allows you to optimise the system. It's a programme that will run on Mac or PC and it will guide you through a setup process.

Can you talk us through some of the recent developments in GLM, such as the AutoCal 2 algorithm and the GRADE room report feature?

We have continued to develop GLM since 2006, and we’re about to launch version five. In previous versions, we've added refinements to the calibration process. A big one was when we moved from AutoCal 1 to AutoCal 2. AutoCal is our calibration algorithm that we've developed that allows us to have a line of best fit, where we want the loudspeaker system to fall within certain parameters.

By hosting it in the cloud, it has allowed us to implement a few different things. One of them was to be able to continue to tweak the algorithm so that any customers that are calibrating their systems have always got the latest version of the algorithm. 

What it also allows us to do is to cross reference customers’ measurements, so we've got access to an enormous data set of measurements. We can see trends in the way that people's loudspeakers are measuring and it informs us of how we can add tools that are going to help customers. One thing that we looked at recently was the addition of positive gain for certain bands within the frequency response.

We believe that we're in a unique position because we manufacture the loudspeakers, and we have a certain quality of service that if we sell a loudspeaker that has a spec, it will reproduce 100dB at one metre, so we need to ensure that it will continue to do that. 

If we then start to look at calibration techniques that involve positive gain with infinite filters and infinite amounts of gain that we can add, we're going to start to hamstring the system in terms of the available headroom, so that speaker that was once rated at 100 dB at one metre might then start to reproduce 95 or 94, or less than that. We want to preserve the performance of the physical hardware and the electro acoustic design, so we look to solve that in other ways.

One of the more recent developments was the addition of the GRADE report, which is the Genelec room acoustic data evaluation. It's a hugely detailed report that can be generated when you take a measurement in GLM. There's a little tick box in there that once you're about to make the sweep, if you tick ‘generate GRADE’, you can put in some information about the room dimensions, what the system consists of, the kind of the speaker models, etc. 

Within two or three minutes, this report is sent to your inbox and this gives you an enormous amount of information in terms of what's happening in the time domain of the room and with early reflections – you can use it to build a picture of the acoustic properties of the room. 

Like I say, the loudspeakers and the room are an absolute marriage; they've got to work together. The GRADE is a means of being able to shine a light on what's happening within the space and guide you in the direction of what type of acoustic treatment you might want to use.

Can you talk us through the new MyGenelec portal and what role it plays in the UNIO platform?

MyGenelec is a central hub for many of the elements that are starting to come online, whether that be software downloads, product registration – you can even start to separate out your loudspeakers in different rooms. 

Say, for example, if you are at a facility or a university, and you've got loads of different pairs of monitors or immersive systems that are dotted around the facility, you can create rooms where all of your warranty information is in one place. It makes the process of administering your general inventory a little bit easier for users.

We've also got access to support forums and quick chats as well. So if you've got any issues with your system, you can get your support ticket on the way. 

Then as things start to develop with the UNIO platform, we'll start to see, ‘This would be where your GRADE reports will be delivered’, so instead of having to trawl back through your emails, you'll have a central spot where all of your product information and GRADE reports will be, and then any additional software services that may come along as part of the UNIO platform. Again, it's just trying to bring together all of these different strands of Genelec to bridge that gap between the hardware and the software services that we offer.

What future developments can we expect to see from the UNIO platform?

As we start to move through the back end of the year, there's going to be some significant announcements coming throughout October, November and definitely December, so it's going to be a busy year. 

It's our 45th anniversary this year and we've had the launch of our flagship system, the 8381A, which was a massive launch for us, we've had launches in the AV world with our 4435A and 4436A, plus the 9320A and then there'll be other announcements further on the year.