The Porsche sounds angry. Loud. All around me. I’m coming up to another corner at Brands Hatch, willing myself to focus, when the track disappears. I’m back on the gravel, and everything shakes. I worry about dropping my phone as I hear stones scattering en route to the barrier. This would be an expensive afternoon if the Porsche 992 GT3 – or any of the damage – were real. Thankfully, I’m ‘only’ strapped into a professional sim racing rig. What could it possibly cost? £40,000? Oh. I’d better be careful then.
I crash out more than once, of course. I spend perhaps 15 or 20 minutes in the sim and climb out, shattered. There’s barely time to think about one corner before the next demands my attention – which might explain how often I end up pointing the wrong way.
This is SIM Motorsport’s race centre at Brands Hatch, where young drivers train for real circuits with championship-winning racers as coaches. I’m here to try Innit Audio – software that processes the sim’s sound to give its engines, tyres, and track a more natural sense of space. But first, I need to keep a car on the circuit long enough to listen…
This simulator means business
SIM Motorsport CEO Simon Ricketts talks us through the hardware. Four D-BOX actuators move the rig beneath you. I’ve no idea what a D-BOX actuator is, but I suspect my backside will soon find out. The brakes use hardware from a Porsche GT3 race car, and the team bled the hydraulic lines that morning, just as they would in a real car. Simon warns that the pedal is rock hard.
We’re due to start in a Caterham 270R on the Brands Hatch Indy circuit. It has a clutch. I have an automatic licence. Simon kindly adjusts things instead of making me demonstrate the limits of my left foot in front of everyone. It may also explain how I somehow clock the fastest laps of the day between crashes – I have one less thing to worry about.
The real 270R is an open-cockpit racer without even a windscreen. In the sim, its tyres are clearly audible against the track, giving me something to listen for as I try to judge each corner. All this comes through a Panasonic SoundSlayer – a speaker that sits around my neck and leaves my ears free – with Innit processing the game’s audio.
Then I swap to the Porsche, whose engine sounds guttural, raw, almost animalistic. As I accelerate, that snarl is every bit as thrilling as the movement beneath me. It’s an enormous amount of noise from something resting on my shoulders, and it draws me into the car as convincingly as the controls in front of me.
Behind me, racing driver and instructor Tom Ovenden calls each corner – off the gas, brake hard, release, turn in, accelerate. Having my ears uncovered means I can hear him too, which is fortunate. There’s enough to learn here without accidentally ignoring the racing driver.
For the drivers who train here, tyre noise and changing revs help them judge what the car is doing. Innit says its processing makes those cues sound more natural.
Simon says Innit helps his drivers feel more connected to their cars. In feedback collected by Innit, a Le Mans class-winning driver says it helped him anticipate grip and find a second on a lap almost as soon as he turned it on. With Innit switched on throughout my session, I was too busy enjoying the good laps – and trying to salvage the others – to think about an audio comparison. Innit’s Martin Lindgren has a quieter way to show me what the software adds.
A voice makes the difference clear
Away from the demands of the circuit, I finally have a chance to give the SoundSlayer my full attention. Martin’s demonstration uses a human voice – something rather more familiar to me than a Porsche at full throttle. He plays an Eclipsa Audio clip on YouTube, in which a disembodied head speaks, shouts, and whispers as it moves across the screen. Its voice travels around me, creating a convincing bubble of sound even before Innit is switched on. My ears are completely uncovered, yet I feel surrounded. It’s a strangely freeing way to listen.
Martin switches Innit on, and that voice gains something I hadn’t realised was missing. It sounds fuller, and richer, with more warmth and presence. I could already follow it around my head. Now it feels more like someone speaking in the space around me.
Imagine looking at a tree without your prescription glasses. You can see the trunk and a green blob of leaves. Put the glasses on, though, and you can make out individual leaves, along with the knots and bumps in the bark. That feeling of recognising what was missing is what Innit gives me here.
To understand why, I turn to the person who built it.
Recreating the space around sound
Bernt Böhmer has spent much of his life trying to understand what makes audio sound real. Innit’s founder and chief science officer built his first loudspeaker at 14. At one point, he filled his listening room with about 30 microphones.
To explain it, Bernt asks us to picture a swimming pool. Drop a stone into the water and ripples spread outwards. Some reach you directly. Others hit the sides and bounce back, reaching you later and from different directions. Sound behaves similarly, except it travels through the space around us rather than across a flat surface. When someone speaks, we hear their voice both directly and reflected off our surroundings. Those reflections help give us a sense of the space we’re in.
Bernt argues that ordinary stereo playback doesn’t reproduce enough of that surrounding sound convincingly. He says Innit picks out quieter ambience already in the audio, raises its level, and processes it to seem to arrive from different directions and distances. As with the pool’s ripples, timing helps create the illusion of sound extending around us from just two speakers.
Bernt can make this ‘virtual room’ seem spacious while its reflections die away quickly, avoiding a lingering concert-hall echo. That helps explain the extra presence I heard in Martin’s demo.
Headphones need an extra step because they deliver sound straight to our ears, bypassing its usual paths around our head and body. Innit says it models additional paths, with tiny differences in timing, level, and tone, to make sounds seem outside our heads. This is separate from the virtual-room processing used with the SoundSlayer.
Beyond the racing sim
Innit’s appeal extends beyond the racing sim because it works with audio people already have. According to the company, that can be ordinary stereo or the two-channel output of a system such as Dolby Atmos. There’s no need for a specially recorded Innit album or an Innit edition of a game.
For now, there’s a Windows PC version, with subscription and one-off purchase options and a month’s free trial. Innit says it works with the headphones or earbuds you already own. The company wants its processing built into phones and earbuds too, although those remain ambitions rather than announced products.
After hearing what Innit can do at Brands Hatch, I’d happily see it built into more of the things I listen to every day. Admittedly, I spent a fair amount of my time there in the gravel. But I can’t fault how it sounded getting there.
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