The Art of the Audio

The Invisible Conductor of an Experience

The first thing Brian Iacobucci, Senior Audio Engineer at Cramer, does when he learns about a stage is figure out what that stage is going to break.

Not what it’s going to look like. Not what gear it needs. What the room is going to do to the sound — where it’s going to cause trouble, where it’s going to create opportunity, and what assumptions from the last show no longer apply. For FM’s Client Engagement 2026 conference, the answer came early: the main stage was a theatre-in-the-round. Screens on all four sides. Attendees facing every direction. No front of the room.

That single detail dismantled every standard audio instinct.

Stereo Is an Assumption You Don’t Know You’re Making

Most live event audio is built around a shared fiction: that the audience is facing the same direction. Left and right exist because there’s an implied forward. A stereo mix works because everyone, more or less, is oriented the same way. Pull that assumption out and the whole framework goes with it.

In a theatre-in-the-round, orientation collapses. One person’s front-facing speaker is another person’s rear surround, making every seat a unique listening position. Send the same sound through all of them at full volume and you don’t get presence — you get mud. Overlapping signals, competing arrivals, a wash of noise that feels loud but communicates nothing.

The challenge stops being about volume and becomes about intention. Where does each sound live, and why does it live there?

The Office That Became a Venue

Before a single cable was run at the FM’s site, Brian rebuilt the venue’s show room inside his office. Not precisely — he wasn’t aiming for a replica, but rather an environment that could mimic the behavior of a true theatre-in-the-round. The goal was to approximate the intended experience early, using visual stand-ins to ensure the audio aligned cleanly, transitioned seamlessly, and directed attention exactly as intended — without error. Speakers were positioned to encircle the space — front, back, and on each side — with four monitors standing in for the LED screens that would ultimately surround the audience. The setup resembled a working studio mid-experiment: C-stands, cable runs, and mounted speakers, tilted and angled inward toward the center.

And through it all, he wasn’t listening for how good it sounded. He was listening for where it broke.

That’s a different discipline than mixing. Mixing is about balance and clarity in a known environment. What Brian was doing in that office was stress-testing decisions before the environment existed — finding the moments where two sounds arriving from different distances would smear into each other, where a percussive hit in the main speakers would echo against a side channel and arrive late to half the room, where directing attention toward one screen might accidentally abandon the audience members whose backs were turned to it.

The office sim was never going to sound like the ballroom and that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to surface the problems that only reveal themselves when you’re surrounded, so they could be solved before there was anything at stake.

Where Sound Goes, Attention Follows

The FM’s opening sequence was built around natural hazards — fire, flooding, wind, earthquakes — each appearing on a different screen. The instinct in a conventional setup would be to run it all through the main speakers and call it immersive. Brian went a different direction.

Each effect lived where its visual lived. Fire on one screen meant fire audio through that screen’s speaker. Wind pulling your attention to another side wasn’t a prompt or a cue — it was just physics, the sound arriving from the direction of the image. Attendees weren’t being told where to look, they were being guided there, without knowing it was happening.

That’s the thing about directional audio that takes time to understand, the goal is to make the room feel like it has a point of view. When a sound arrives from behind you, your nervous system responds before your brain does. You turn. You look. The story has moved you without announcing itself.

Brian put it simply during the conversation: We’re storytellers. A non-visual one. You’re not decorating the picture — you’re narrating it from another channel entirely.

The Loudest Moment Was 1,500 Voices

One sequence from the FM opening deserves its own mention. At the close of the piece, 1,500 attendees had pre-recorded themselves saying “One FM” — the company’s internal rallying phrase. The recordings came in from employees speaking English, and several other languages, and the plan was to bring all of them into the room at once.

On two speakers, that’s a crowd. On ten distributed channels in a theatre-in-the-round, each voice arrives from a different point in space. You don’t hear a mass of sound — you hear individuals, each one distinct, all of them saying the same thing. The cumulative effect is different in kind, not just in scale. People in the room weren’t hearing a recording of 1,500 colleagues. They were, for a moment, surrounded by them.

That’s what the channel count made possible. Not volume. Presence.

When Nobody Talks About the Audio

The FM opening ran multiple times across the event — once for each wave of attendees — with the same result each time. No adjustments needed. No moments where something felt off and nobody could name why. Leaders stood in front of their audience and let the experience speak.

Leaders stood in front of their audience knowing the experience would deliver. Attendees walked away talking about the content, the message, the energy in the room.

Nobody talked about the audio. And that’s the always the intention.

The measure of whether this kind of work succeeded isn’t applause for the sound design. It’s the complete absence of the sound design from the conversation. When audio is working the way it should, it disappears — into the story, into the moment, into whatever emotion the room is meant to carry.

Brian put it plainly, “If no one notices the audio, that means it worked.”

The prep that goes into that invisibility — the office simulation, the channel mapping, the stem isolation, the coordination with the live team, the key-matched transitions, the pad underneath the silence — none of it shows up in the recap. None of it gets acknowledged in the post-event survey.

It just works. And working, invisibly, completely, without a single moment that pulls an attendee out of the experience — that’s the whole job.

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