The tech behind the LEWITT Space Replicator plugin

The development of Space Replicator started in the LEWITT lab, a research group of ours that specialises in solving complex technical problems.

The user-reactive sensor of RAY, the first microphone with autofocus for your voice, was born there, for example, and so was the ultra-low self-noise tube circuit of PURE TUBE.

For Space Replicator, we developed a process to capture real spaces and turn them into virtual acoustic spaces with extremely high resolution. How does this work?

When you are in a room and playing music through speakers, the listening experience depends on the speaker system and room acoustics, i.e., the room's size, absorption, and reflection properties.

Your position in the room and your head-related transfer function (HRTF) also play an important role. The HRTF, or binaural profile, describes how you filter and process sound.

Just imagine that in the illustration below, your head is the sphere in the middle. The points on the sphere are different frequency responses of sound that reflect from the room and hit your ears from various directions.

For Space Replicator, we first separate space and spatial perception and then combine the two so that we can tailor them to your individual hearing and your headphones to achieve lifelike realism.

These points give our auditory system the information on where the sound is coming from, by the level difference (ILD), and by the difference in arrival time (ITD) in the left and right ears.

This forms your individual hearing perception of the room. First, our capturing process takes a uniquely large number of these data points, about 1500 individual filters, into account, which enables extremely high-resolution room representations.

First, we separate space and spatial perception and then combine the two so that we can tailor them to your individual hearing and your headphones to achieve lifelike realism.

In the second step, we combine them with your personal binaural profile (HRTF), which you can create with Space Replicator.

To ensure that the virtual acoustic representation of the spaces, in combination with the playback system, is not colored by your headphones, they are compensated via a headphone compensation profile in a third step.

As a result, you can experience captured spaces as if you were there using the headphone model you already have.

Space Replicator allows people without access to an acoustically treated space to create mixes they can trust.

Space Replicator is an audio stereo plugin that you use on the master bus of your DAW, which can create virtual acoustic spaces on your headphones.

When it comes to mixing, Space Replicator transforms the in-head localization of headphones into the experience of sitting in front of a professional speaker system, which makes working with audio much easier.

It offers a great variety of professional mixing and mastering rooms. Ideal for anything from critical listening to extra-long mixing sessions, always with the natural stereo field of high-end speaker systems.

The plugin also offers virtual acoustic spaces to check how your mixes translate where your audience will play it – on a smartphone in the living room, car, or the club.