Inside South Loop Studios: A Spatial Audio Suite Built in Months

In this episode I sit down with Ben Weatherill, the solo developer behind South Loop Studios — the company that seemed to appear out of nowhere late last year and has quickly become one of the most talked-about names in immersive audio. What began as a small side project to help his students at Coventry University snowballed, in a matter of months, into a whole suite of spatial audio tools: Orbit, Orbit Lite, Orbit Pro, the Esfera streaming platform, the open OSLS speaker layout system, and the Cota loudness meter. It's a genuinely remarkable story about how far one person can go when they build for the love of the craft.

We get into where South Loop Studios came from, why Ben is betting on open formats like IAMF and Google Eclipsa, how he thinks about Dolby Atmos and Apple Spatial Audio, and what it actually takes to build professional-grade audio software as a team of one. Along the way we cover ADM quality control, HRTF and binaural rendering, custom speaker layouts, the untapped potential of spatial podcasts, and where he sees immersive audio heading over the next few years. Whether you're deep into Dolby Atmos and Eclipsa or just curious about the future of 3D sound, there's a lot here you won't want to miss — and yes, that rumbling you hear in the background is a very real thunderstorm.