# Inside the Immersive Classroom: A Guided Tour of Echoes and the Story Behind It

> Tour the Spatial9 Immersive Classroom, discover the story of Echoes and its creator Luiz Zanardo, and learn why each of its 23 stems sits where it does. A free immersive audio lesson.

Web page: https://spatial9.ai/blog/academy-classroom-tour
Author: Spatial9 Team
Published: 2026-10-16. Updated: 2026-10-31.

## Key takeaways
- The Immersive Classroom has a transport with A/B, the Ask Niner bar, the Sphere and 7.1.4 view, a mix console, a stem rack, a spectrum and a Controls menu.
- A · Spatial plays the immersive mix and B · Stereo plays the original stereo mix, so you can judge every spatial choice against a reference.
- Echoes keeps bass, lead, snares and impacts on a stable front stage, puts pads on the sides and an atmosphere overhead, and lets only the arp, risers and transitions move.
- On large screens the console, Sphere, stems and spectrum panels can pop out into floating windows that remember their layout.
- Echoes was created by Luiz Zanardo, Spatial9 CEO and co-founder, an Armada Music and Black Hole Recordings artist supported by Armin van Buuren, Paul van Dyk, Ferry Corsten and Nora En Pure, whose tech career spans HP, Intel, Cloudera and Databricks.

In this lesson: You will tour every part of the Spatial9 Immersive Classroom, learn what each panel is for, and study Echoes, the 23-stem reference mix that every free student starts with. By the end you will know where to look, what to listen for and why each sound sits where it does.

The first two modules of Spatial9 Academy gave you the theory: how the brain hears in 3D, how formats describe space and how GravityLLM proposes a spatial scene. This module is different. It is a feature-by-feature course on the tool you will practise in for the rest of the Academy, the Immersive Classroom.

Think of this lesson as the first day in a new studio. Before you touch a fader, you walk the room, learn the names of things and listen to a mix that the studio is proud of. That is exactly what we will do here.


## What you will learn

- The layout of the Immersive Classroom and the job of each panel.
- How to use the transport, the A/B switch and the position bar.
- What the Ask Niner bar does and when to use it.
- Where the Controls menu lives and what each of its five groups changes.
- The story behind Echoes and Luiz Zanardo, the artist and engineer who created it.
- The mix intent behind Echoes and the role of each of its 23 stems.
- How to read the "Why Niner placed it here" note on every stem card.

The rest of this lesson is free with a Spatial9 account: https://spatial9.ai/blog/academy-classroom-tour