Very true. The SACD I’ve got of Berlioz’s Requiem really comes into its own when you get the four brass bands which Berlioz said should be placed at each of the four points of the compass thundering away at you from four different directions - a stereo recording can’t really do this justice.
Another good example is Tallis’s Spem in Alium, which is often performed with all 40 singers ‘in the round’ and this is a good candidate for being recorded and played back in at least 4.0 to get the right effect. Whether 5.1 adds much to this, let alone 7.1.4, is a different matter!
I dont remember that but I’d guess they assume you look at the screen (forward) when you start.
They have an accelerator/gyroscope-chip in your headphones that report back to the playback software in the computer. So they know how you move your head, and how fast.
When you mix in Atmos you mix static stuff (basically old-style 7.1.4) as a base (its called “base channels”) and you have mix with object channels where the position is metadata and can be moved by the playback system. I think you can have 8 objects that react to Spatial.
They combine this with something that probably is a simple variant of the Atmos Renderer. So think games, you are in room with a fixed soundscape and you have other players moving around.
AV system has all the types includes DTX, just not Dolby Vision.
Most Disney and some Prime and Netflix are also Atmos.
The point i was making is Atmos has also branched in PC, laptops, tablets and mobile phones, for which it is quite good, that said i do not use any of the Atmos, 360 Audio setting for my mobile, mainly due to i like the SQ as it was and mainly use Qobuz. I have dabbled with Atmos/360 with IEMs and Tidal i don’t like it for music, now for watching a movie on the go with 360 head tracking it is quite immersive.
I get that. But I actually meant, my phone, tablet, and laptop all do DTS:X (the spacial audio competitor for ATMOS) but not ATMOS.
I expect there to be two or more spacial audio formats competing indefinitely. The point I was making is that ATMOS isn’t the game in town trying to do the same thing.
I still don’t see the attraction of trying to scale up a $80k stereo to spacial audio with the prospect of another 5 power amps and speakers of similar quality.
For example. You could spend $80K on a 252/SC/300/PMC Fact12, or you could spend $80k on vastly inferior speakers for 5.1.2, lesser power amps and a lesser preamp.
The good old Ambsonics it was developed in the UK under the auspices of the British National Research Development Corporation. It handle full 360 degree sphere of sound.
I think Nimbus has a large number of Ambisonic recordings. As part of the project Calrec (UK maker of pro microphones) developed a Soundfield microphone that recorded a full 360 degree sphere soundfield encoded to the Ambisonics B-format (needing only 3-channels). Today Sennheiser also makes a soundfield mic (amongst a few more).
I’ve heard B-format soundfield recordings played back on a 36-speaker system (all speakers in a sphere). Very impressive.
You can do a lot of impressive things with B-format and some maths, like a virtual directional mic to zoom into some area. Or simulate a blumlein stereo-mic. There is open-source code for Ambisonics available.
You can even mix ambisonics B-format on a stereo mixer if you are a bit clever with bus-channels. In the 70’s records where released with UHJ-encoding which (compared to the SQ-system) sounded decent in normal stereo.
Now Atmos. Dolby used the ideas from Ambisonics and created Atmos (I guess the patents had expired) but they needed compatibility with old 5.1 and 7.1 mixes so they complicated it a bit. Also for consumer installations they wanted fixed speaker layouts (again 5.1, 7.1, 7.1.4) so they addad that.
They defined a 128-channel format that connects the mixer with something they call Atmos Renderer. You can declare which of those channels are fixed and which are object-based (moveable). And then you declare you speaker setup. How the room looks and where you have placed speakers. The Atmos Renderer will then do the maths and with everything setup it can be a very impressive demo.
But if the consumer dont have access to the 128-channels and the Atmos Renderer (currently 999 dollars) and described the room and the speaker setup (Linn Space Optimization?) then they create and distribute pre-rendered 5.1 and 7.1 and 7.1.4 layouts, and unless you have an adapted room with suitable speakers that setup often sound less impressive.
I bet no one read all this … and this is the problem with Dolby Atmos, it is process that require pre-planning and careful setup vs. normal honest music recording where mixing in stereo is simple and intuitive.
One correction. The 128 channels aren’t audio channels. They are object chanels. So the renderer calculates where in the 3d space the object is and steers it across the available audio channels.
NHK also have a competing format 22 audio only channels.
FWIW if you want to hear how a pair of stereo speakers can create a surround effect from a QSound recorded album have a listen to Roger Waters - Amused to death. It has me literally looking over my shoulder. If you can do that using existing kit then I’d love to hear an Atmos stereo recording via two speakers.
QSound always sounded like listening at the bottom of a giant fish bowl to me.
It was literally created using a room with speakers and relying on the room to interact (unusually) and used a mannequin head with microphones inside realistically moulded ears and in the mouth.
What you were getting was a recording of a playback of a recording. Probably the most well known release was Madonna’s Immaculate Collection.
Agree with your comment regarding Roger Waters - Amused to death brilliant in Qsound stunning. That dog is way over my right shoulder, the whole album is an aural feast. I can also recommend pink floyd animals re mix stella
Apple has the head tracking / virtual surround as a base feature available to multiple use cases. I do like to be able to “pin” (stereo) audio from my AirPod Pros to the iPad, e.g. when on a train. That’s so natural, that I thought a few times, I had the speakers working - only they would’t sound that good on a loud train. The feature can compute virtual surround and/or pin the music. First time I had surround on my Apple TV with the AirPods, since anything else here is stereo only. - The up/down they can get from the gyroscope; maybe Bluetooth helps with finding the relation between AirPods and whichever screen is involved for video.
For listening to stereo music, I disable all that, since it sounds best to me, when it’s just stereo, irrspective of how I move my head. There’s no fixed point to relate to, so always being in the stereo sweet spot sounds appealing to me.
For how it works: I get it, using (tracking) headsets.
I wonder, how much this feature can bring, when used on in-built (stereo) speakers of a MacBook or iMac. It feels a bit like adding cool buzzwords; so I’m curious what magic they can do with computing audio waves here. (I get it, if you have multiple directional speakers, like on the larger HomePod model or what other companies do with soundbars including arrays of speakers.)
For audio, Apple Music uses Atmos as encoding, or as they say “Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos”. And then use the above feature to “render” it to the available audio devices.
(They could use anything else as well, I guess - but Apple tends to pick 1 type of audio/video format, and stick with it exclusively for a longer time. Like Quicktime video in the past, AAC audio for nearly 20 years now, H.264/265 video, etc.)
I would have to double check, if they reserve “Spatial” just for audio on Apple Music.
I was reading an interview with a senior engineer at Dolby Labs who was explaining that according to their in depth research and testing, the number of speakers is far more important to the quality of the experience than the quality of speakers or any other aspect such as bitrate of the data stream. Truly quantity beat quality. As such, their quest for superior quality was all about increasing the number of audio channels. Went on to give some analogy, that I’ve heard before in a business quality control context, claiming that if you take a great pair of speakers and attribute their quality a rating of 50 each giving a total rating of 100, and then compare it a surround system with 9 low cost speakers that were poor in comparison and maybe score a 20 each, then overall your quality rating is 180. Nearly twice as much definition as the expensive stereo.
I vehemently disagree with this. But it is certainly a way of looking at it. By that logic, my Dali 7.1.4 ATMOS system should wipe the floor with my Naim/PMC stereo setup. Which of course it won’t. I’ve yet to install it but I am 99.9% sure which system sounds better for music. I’d be prepared to come clean and fess up to being wrong if it proves otherwise.
I have had an atmos system for years, much to my wifes annoyance, but it is definitely more at home used in an av system, works but done properly it should be subtle, not for me with music, I’ve heard good Hifi systems deliver sufficient ambience for my liking.
