The Audio Research Laboratory at the University of Essex is part of the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering. Established in 1976, the group provides a bespoke facility for conducting research into multi-channel audio, audio coding, loudspeaker systems and system measurement. It includes an isolated listening space as well as a student facility equipped with networked computers. The listening space incorporates a sixteen-channel monitoring system exploiting small-profile, low diffraction loudspeakers, multi-channel amplifiers and multi-channel high-resolution soundcards. Tools supporting loudspeaker investigation are provided as well as a range of electronic instrumentation for audio evaluation, spectral analysis and maximum length sequence (MLS) measurements. By way of example, recent work has included topics on the HILN low bit rate coder for spatial teleconferencing, recently invented "soundlet processing", switching amplifier systems and virtual instrumentation exploiting Volterra system modelling.