I had to sign an NDA before Dolby would tell me what I was about to hear.

Dolby Atmos wasn't a trend. It wasn't even publicly available.

I was working as the CTO of a post-production company and as a re-recording mixer. I already knew the people at Dolby through my work when they contacted me about a new audio format they were developing.

There was one condition before they could tell me anything: I had to sign an NDA.

My boss and I were then invited to Dolby's European headquarters in England. That was where I heard Dolby Atmos for the first time.

My reaction wasn't analytical:

“This is incredible. We need this.”

At that point Atmos was a cinema format. Immersive music streaming wasn't part of the conversation. But I understood immediately that this could change how we create and experience sound.

We returned to Germany and began building the country's first Dolby Atmos mixing stage.

That's when the real work started.

There was no proven workflow to copy. Components you can simply order today didn't exist yet. Even finding the right mounts to position all those additional loudspeakers became a technical problem to solve.

We experimented constantly. Dolby supported us throughout, but everyone involved was still discovering what worked — technically and creatively.

During one of our first productions, there was a scene where the camera moved around an actor. We thought: why not rotate the entire orchestra with it? So we did. It was wild. The technology made it possible. Whether it was the best creative decision is another question — today I would probably mix that scene differently.

The technology shows you what is possible. Experience teaches you what actually serves the content.

When immersive music arrived on streaming platforms, two parts of my professional life finally connected: my technical experience from cinema and my work as a musician.

But music required a different way of thinking.

A song usually gives you fewer elements than a film production. That creates more freedom — and it makes every spatial decision more exposed. You can't hide behind spectacle. Every placement and movement needs a musical reason.

My early music workflow used a conventional 7.1.2 bed alongside discrete objects. That worked, but I kept running into the maximum channel width available to me in Pro Tools.

The problem wasn't that beds and objects couldn't be used together. They could. The bottleneck was building the foundation of the mix around a 7.1.2 channel structure when I wanted the spatial resolution and flexibility of a 9.1.6 environment.

So I implemented an Object-Bed workflow and adapted it to the way I wanted to work. I didn't invent the underlying concept — I refined it around my own technical requirements and creative decisions.

The first major project I completed with it was Moderat's MORE D4TA.

Since 2019 I've mixed more than 1,400 songs in Dolby Atmos.

My immersive work on Rodriguez Jr.'s Feathers and Bones received two VISION OF SOUND Awards in 2024, including the Audience Award and Best Electronic. In 2025 I received a German Songwriting Award in the Best Immersive category.

But the mixes and the awards aren't why I built the Spatial Audio Academy. The reason was the questions I kept hearing.

I've taught dozens of workshops at universities and trade shows and coached engineers individually. Again and again, experienced producers and mixing engineers asked me the same three things: how to structure an Atmos session. Which workflows actually hold up in professional productions. And once everything is technically connected — what can you creatively do with it?

The problem was never a lack of information. It was that the information was fragmented. You could watch dozens of tutorials, understand every one of them, and still not know how to take a real song from session setup to a finished, quality-controlled Atmos master.

It took me more than a decade and over 1,400 real-world mixes to develop the experience behind this process.

You don't have to start from zero.