Spatial Audio on a Budget: The Ambisonics Construction Set

While I was in Cologne for Gamescom, I took the chance to drive an hour out of the city and visit Thorsten Michels at his home. If you saw our first conversation, The Ambisonics Maker, you know Thorsten builds immersive microphone arrays out of ordinary hardware — rods, spheres, light stands, adapters — and publishes every tutorial and shopping list for free. Last time we only talked about it. This time he unpacked the whole thing on the table in front of me, piece by piece, and I finally got to see how a DIY ambisonics construction set actually goes together.

We also spent time with the spcmic, a flat 84-capsule MEMS array I'd wanted to test for ages but could never get hold of. Thorsten owns one, so we dug into what it does well, where its wind protection falls short, and how it compares to his Zylia ZM-1. From there the conversation opened up: his rebuilds of the ECHO Project arrays from AIR Studios at a fraction of the original cost, why almost nobody is recording audiobooks and radio drama in immersive formats, and whether the recent wave of new ambisonics plugins signals a genuine renaissance. Thorsten also offers free introductory sessions to universities and schools — details and every shopping list are on his site, linked below.