Grand Cayman · an Omnivations Group company
The charter
Audio Futures is at home in Grand Cayman, in the Cayman Islands, and has been since 2020. It is a working company, incorporated under Cayman law, with an office on the island. Not a letterbox, not a pop-up, not a flag of convenience.
We are the worldwide exclusive distributor of WalkMix Creator, for mixing music in Sony's 360 Reality Audio format, available today, and of Inventio, coming this fall.
Audio Futures is an Omnivations Group company and a proud member of Tech Cayman, the islands' technology community.
walkmix.comWrite to usAvailable now
360 WalkMix Creator lets a musician mix in a full sphere of sound, in Sony's 360 Reality Audio Music Format, inside the recording software they already use: Audio Units, VST3 and AAX, on macOS and Windows.
Audio Futures distributes it to the whole world from this island. That is what the sign on the beach means.
Set sail for walkmix.comComing this fall
The next thing from the WalkMix family. Inventio is a new way for musicians to make and publish video for their music, from the Mac and from the web, with the sound mixed the WalkMix way.
We are not telling the whole story yet. The parrot knows more than he lets on, and he is not telling either.
Watch walkmix.comThe ship's log
On the hill
The house on the hill is drawn after Pedro St. James, the oldest standing building in the Cayman Islands, raised in stone around 1780 near Savannah on Grand Cayman.
In December 1831 islanders met there and resolved to elect representatives: the beginning of Cayman's own parliament. In May 1835 the proclamation that ended slavery in the islands was read from its steps. Caymanians call it the birthplace of democracy in the Cayman Islands.
We liked the idea of a company that keeps the lamps lit in a house like that.
On the sea floor
In February 1794 a convoy led by the frigate HMS Convert struck the reef off East End, Grand Cayman, in the dark. Ten ships were lost in a single night. Caymanians rowed out through the surf and brought the crews ashore.
The story that a grateful King George III rewarded the islands with freedom from taxation forever is a legend, not a law. Caymanians will tell you it is a very good legend.
Las Tortugas
On 10 May 1503 Christopher Columbus sighted two low islands so thick with sea turtles that he named them Las Tortugas. Later maps borrowed a Carib word for crocodile, caimán, and the name Cayman stuck.
For three centuries turtling fed the islands and paid their way. Today the green turtle is protected, nests on Cayman's beaches again, and sits at the top of the islands' coat of arms.
In North Sound
Inside the reef of Grand Cayman's North Sound is a sandbar where fishermen once cleaned their catch on the way home. The southern stingrays learned that the sound of an engine meant dinner, and they still arrive when the boats do.
Visitors now wade in waist-deep water among dozens of them. The rays are gentle if you are.
Found nowhere else
The Grand Cayman blue iguana lives on this one island and nowhere else on Earth. By 2002 fewer than two dozen were thought to remain in the wild.
A recovery programme bred them, released them and protected the land they need. Today more than a thousand roam the island's east. It is one of the great conservation comebacks, and it happened here.
National treasures
The wild banana orchid is Cayman's national flower. It grows on trees rather than in soil, and blooms in the spring.
The silver thatch palm is the national tree. For two hundred years Caymanians twisted its leaves into rope that did not rot in seawater and traded it across the Caribbean.
The Grand Cayman parrot is the national bird. The one in the palm has opinions about Inventio.
On the horizon
We cannot say. Pirates did call at these islands in the old days, and the islands do not pretend otherwise. But Cayman's own seafaring is the better story: schooners built on the beaches of Grand Cayman, crews who sailed every ocean in the world and sent their wages home, and a seafarers' tradition the islands still honour.
Audio Futures carries its own cargo the same way, to every port there is: WalkMix Creator today, Inventio this fall.
At the jetty
Small, fast and built to be rowed or sailed, the catboat was designed on Cayman Brac in 1904 for turtling on the banks, and for a generation it was how Caymanians went to sea. Every one of them was built by hand on the beach from island timber.
Today a catboat club keeps the old boats sailing and races them on holidays. Ours is tied up here because it would be rude to have a jetty and no boat.
On the reef
Each branch of coral is a colony of tiny animals, the polyps, that build limestone around themselves a little at a time. The colour comes from algae living inside them; when the water gets too warm the algae leave and the coral turns white, which is why divers here watch the sea temperature the way farmers watch the sky.
Reefs ring all three Cayman Islands. In 1986 the islands set aside marine parks around them, among the first in the Caribbean, and off Little Cayman the Bloody Bay Wall drops from a few metres of water into thousands, straight down. To the south of Grand Cayman the sea floor falls into the Cayman Trench, the deepest water in the Caribbean.
Elkhorn, staghorn, brain coral and purple sea fans all grow a short swim from this beach. Look, do not touch; the polyps are softer than they seem.
The red one in the crevice is a flame scallop. It lives wedged into the reef, fringed with tentacles, with a pale streak along its mantle that flickers like a tiny light. Startle it and it claps its shells shut and scoots backwards on a jet of water.
Under the island
Grand Cayman is a limestone island, and under its north side water has been carving caves for longer than there have been people to find them: stalactites, stalagmites and pools of water so clear they look empty.
Island stories say pirates sheltered in caves like these. The crystal caves at Old Man Bay opened to visitors in 2016, and nobody has found the pirates yet.
On the horizon
Cayman is three islands. Grand Cayman is the big one, where we live. Ninety miles to the north-east lie Cayman Brac, with its limestone bluff rising a hundred and forty feet out of the sea, and Little Cayman, where a lagoon shelters one of the largest colonies of red-footed boobies in the Caribbean, and where there are many more iguanas than people.
Caymanians call them the Sister Islands. They are quieter still than here, which takes some doing.
A message in a bottle
Audio Futures Inc.
Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands
support@audiofutures.com reaches real people on the island, for support, for business, and for anyone who would like to come and work with us.
Our group: omnivations.com. Our product: walkmix.com. Our community: techcayman.com.