I trained on a £40,000 racing simulator, but it was the sound that shaved seconds off my times

Anyone who's sat in a proper racing simulator knows that there's quite a difference between a proper rig and the sort of setup that most of us could probably afford to build at home. I'm not knocking the sort of Logitech wheels and pedals that can instantly upgrade your home racing experience, but the sort of rig I drove last week is in a different category.

Over the course of nearly an hour in the rig at Sim Motorsport, a simulation centre at the ultra-historic Brands Hatch raceway in the UK's southeast, I got a sense for just how impressive modern sims have become, and how integral they are to the teaching process for aspiring racing drivers.

What took me by surprise, though, was how a recent upgrade in the sims' audio setup has helped those drivers (and, by a smaller margin, me) shave even more time off their laps.

It's now nearly a year since Sim Motorsport partnered with Innit Audio, a Swedish audio startup that's trying to get the word out about its new approach to spatial audio. Innit's founders have managed to effectively magic up an algorithm that can make two-channel audio sound drastically more realistic to the human ear.

The technical details of how its system works can get baffling quickly, but it basically comes down to more properly representing how sound actually travels to our ears when we hear it. Effectively, when you hear something on your right-hand side, you actually hear it through both your right and left ears, but when you listen to most audio in headphones, the right channel is exclusively in your right ear.

That makes headphones and gaming headsets often feel like bubbles that don't really represent real-world sound, for all that we're all really used to that feeling by now. Innit's system feeds the sound into both channels in marginal ways that mimic the real-world movement of sound waves around your head.

When you try it out, at times it can be like a magic trick – whether listening to music or in-game audio, turning it on can make for bafflingly fuller and more 360-degree sound, even though the audio input hasn't changed in any way.

In the context of a racing simulator, the benefits are marginal but crucial, as explained by a whole heap of testimonials that Innit has been gathering from pro drivers who train in sims constantly. The embedded clip below gives a taste of it if you have headphones on.

Innit [ON/OFF] : Assetto Corsa Gameplay - YouTube

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With the system turned off, you hear the game as you'd expect, and there's nothing clearly wrong with that. Turn it on, though, and you're suddenly hearing more detail with far clearer placement, including the audio of your tyres with more individual clarity.

That sort of audio is massive for natural and instinctive decision-making while racing, and means that you're basically even closer to the real experience of the race you're training for. Some drivers have told Innit that the audio upgrade gets them in the zone quicker, and others have said that it can shave an entire second off tight lap times.

In my time in the sim rig, I wasn't able to toggle Innit on and off, so I couldn't do any sort of scientific comparison – and I'm hardly an experienced driver in the first place. Still, there's no doubt that the audio coming from the neck-mounted gaming speaker being used was way more immersive than I expected, and did indeed, at times, let me make calls about my rear tyre positioning, in particular, with just a little less conscious thought than I'd have expected.

Innit's system was easier to get to grips with in a demo I tried later in the day, where I had the ability to toggle it on and off midway through audio – no matter where it was from. Playing music from Spotify or YouTube, the difference was stark each and every time I turned it on.

There were a couple of cases where I felt like it threw the mix of the music slightly off, but in most cases I heard fuller sound and got more of a sense of my own presence in the soundstage. That's pretty key to what Innit hopes to achieve – its team talks a lot about expanding the sound experience out so that it doesn't just seem like a bubble of audio around your head.

Bernt Böhmer, Innit's founder, told me that while sim racing is where they're currently showcasing Innit's potential to upgrade one's experience, it's far from limited to the track – and for him, the idea started with music: "It's kind of funny because having a background in music and music labs, and all of that, and creating that sort of equipment, I always approached this from a music point of view. So I wanted to recreate reality when music was playing back".

One huge challenge facing Innit is how it gets its audio renderer into people's ears. It could be included right on the chipset in earbuds and headphones, if it were licensed by a partner, but right now the only real route is to download its software to your PC and subscribe to use it there.

Innit's team is clearly hugely keen on the idea of getting the system onto smartphones, since that's where most of us consume the vast majority of our audio each day. That's a daunting process, though, with neither Apple nor Google making it easy to layer this sort of audio processing into their operating systems, for security reasons.

It's a little hard to know whether that means that in a few years I'll nod in recognition when I see Innit's logo attached to a big audio release from a brand like Sony or Sennheiser, swapping out more interventionist and obvious spatialisation tech for this lighter, potentially more accurate-feeling approach; or whether the tech will instead first end up in a phone, laptop, gaming handheld or some other device like it.

Either way, I came away from my demos and sim session feeling impressed by an audio solution that's clearly winning people over via word of mouth. If it can break out of the sim racing scene, it'll be fascinating to see where Innit ends up.