Will Spatial give way to Binaural ultimately?

u0421793

I’m finding myself in an uncomfortable realisation, and it’s entirely possible I’m missing something and I’m incorrect

I’ve spent the past few years during the pandemic (can’t really remember how many years that was, whether we’re at the beginning, the middle, was it decades, were we all on another planet before? who knows, it’s all a blur) making Dobly Atmos remakes of ten of my top ten tunes in LPX

(yes they were composed in Gadget but they’ve come so far since then that I’d say only half of what’s in them is recognisable from the Gadget days)

I’m comfortable with the staging mastering mixing and production of Atmos spatial music (well, as long as it’s my music) and technically I understand what’s occurring in Atmos mastering on Logic Pro X

Here’s the thing

In LPX to master Atmos you’re using the built in gubbins that encode all the object tracks and surround bed track into an ADM BWF master file – this is how it will be distributed (if I ever find a UK-based distrib that can take Atmos masters)

However, for you to actually hear it on the Mac, there’s a continuing stage whereby the spatial mix is transformed into a binaural headphone mix (that’s the one I’ve chosen, anyway) and as such I can monitor it and congratulate myself in my AirsPods Pros 2s – it works, I hear a spatial mix, it resembles what the end user will hear in their headgear when they listen to it in Apple Music or whatever with spatial audio switched on

Okay, now at the moment I’ve not been able to release anything because I’ve not found a distributor that is UK based that can distrib Atmos at a viable cost, so at the moment I’m my own audience, I listen to my album when I go out of the house (rarely) in spatial audio and not wishing to blow my own trumpet (iM1) it sounds good thanks

But, what I’m listening to is actually a Binaural stereo file that I’ve put into iTunes, not the full multi-channel ADMBWF file (iTunes won’t play that). It theoretically should sound the same in spatial – if I set my airspodspros2 to spatial, I get spatial, if I set it to head tracking, it does that too (bit of a gimmick but there you are) (& now you’re over here)

Which makes me wonder – what is the point of Atmos, catering for a complex delivery chain of ADMBWF, decoding/rematrixing for the kind of output device (1speaker/more speakers/headphones) (not sure where the decode happens, on the iPhone or in iTunes server-side?) if my Binaural file does exactly the same job

One spanner in the works would be to suggest that it won’t sound proper if listened to in speakers, and yes I’d say that’s true, but I’d also say most people are going to be wearing headphones of some sort anyway and thus a binaural file is probably sufficient in 90% of cases, and I could be arrogant enough to say that I’m not catering for speaker-wearers, only headphone-wearers

It’d make releasing it easy – it’s a binaural stereo master file, same as any stereo master file

It’d miss out on the current buzz about Atmos (which is currently quite a hot trend, and I’m ready to go with an album's worth of the crap, here)

But if we extrapolate forward a few decades, will binaural stereo have overtaken Atmos, if everyone’s listening mostly in headphones?

btw if anyone wants to hear my binaural stereo spatial effect in speakers I’d encourage them to position the speakers pointing outward to make a stereo dipole (details somewhere in a video I did years ago but probably deleted)

Should I just go ahead and release the binaural stereo masters and be done with it for now? At least I can move it forward that way, and in the future it might turn out that people realise that listening to a binaural master is more or less identical to listening to a proper Atmos one through Apple Music or similar

richardyot

Well I think the push for Atmos is mostly being driven by soundbar and speaker manufacturers: Sonos, Bose, Sony etc... And it's primarily an audio/visual thing at the moment, mostly for home theatre. Atmos for music is pretty much in its infancy and is really riding on the back of the home theatre stuff.

In fact I think it's only Apple that offer Atmos in their headphones, you need Airpods Pro or Max to watch movies with Atmos, AFAIK there's no way of doing so with any other headphones.

Speakers like the HomePod and the Amazon Echo Studio are also a factor for Atmos music.

u0421793

That’s an interesting perspective – I hadn’t seen that the soundbar market was that strong a driver in this field (no puns harmed)

The HomePods and suchlike don’t really come together to do Atmos or surround in any coherent way, from what I’ve read, they can only just manage stereo (if you add a second) with some beamforming to get them away from sounding like they themselves are the point sources of localised sound

I don’t think you can scatter 5.1 HomePods around and expect it to make sense of 5.1 for example, from what I’ve read

From my perspective the Atmos thing was entirely driven by commuters on the tube going through or around Zone 1, with AirPods Pro 2 set to noise cancelling – that I saw as the big market

There’s a big chunk of Apple Music set aside for Atmos, lots of hip artists such as Little Simz and her latest al bum

But I listened to a few of the Atmos albums and to be honest the result I was getting in my head was not greatly different to what I know I can engineer in LPX monitoring it in Binaural – so maybe just realise lots of Binaural stuff instead, not Atmos? I mean, use the Atmos plugin to get the spatial mix, but then only concentrate on a binaural bounce and that’s the end product, not an ABMBWF, plus extra cost and hassle, minus the coolness of having an Atmos album in the Atmos spatial category

btw here’s that experimental video I did years and years ago when I was experimenting with experimental binaural using an experimental home-made experimental binaural head mic earpiece mic thingy that was plugged in to a Nosy AS15 action cam

Listening to that now on my MacBook Pro 16, with the surround-y speakers it has, it’s super super spatial (almost all behind me!) – the speaker dipole thing is illustrated on the video thumbnail though and can't happen on a laptop’s own speakers obv

richardyot

@u0421793 said:
That’s an interesting perspective – I hadn’t seen that the soundbar market was that strong a driver in this field (no puns harmed)

The HomePods and suchlike don’t really come together to do Atmos or surround in any coherent way, from what I’ve read, they can only just manage stereo (if you add a second) with some beamforming to get them away from sounding like they themselves are the point sources of localised sound

I don’t think you can scatter 5.1 HomePods around and expect it to make sense of 5.1 for example, from what I’ve read

Yes the Homepod has to virtualise the Atmos using DSP. Sonos systems can have multiple speakers so they can create authentic 5.1 setups, including soundbars with upwards-firing drivers to put sound above you. There are also soundbars made by Bose, Sennheiser, Sony, and others that work in a similar way, and are able to create very immersive surround sound.

I think ultimately it's because this can be created with speakers that the tech will become more widely adopted - the home cinema market is growing fast because immersive solutions are becoming much more affordable.

And with systems like Sonos the speakers can be discreet and home-decor-friendly since they are wireless. Which also makes them much easier to set up in the first place: you don't need an amp and tons of cabling.

For headphone listening you're probably right, but Atmos is a tiny niche in the headphone world, with only Apple offering limited support on a small number of models. It's really in audio/visual that the tech is taking off.

McD

Is this another Betamax vs VHS where one is a proprietary “standard” with limited hardware options and the other is widely adapted and close enough that in 5 years we’ll wonder why Atmos didn’t win?

When the Metaverse gets here and we’re all living a virtual life where we get our dreams fulfilled for a reasonable subscription fee I wonder how that audio we be encoded. Sony? Are you still trying to control the world?

u0421793

Well, there is a discrepancy already in that the Apple Spatial renderer on the side of the Apple Music consumer is a different renderer to the Dolby Atmos renderer that Amazon and Tidal consumers experience it through – with a lot of the object metadata thrown away by the Apple tech, so monitoring it in binaural at the production might not give you a good idea of how exactly it will sound on one and not the other unless you keep switching rendering models in LPX

(I did with mine a lot but really I can’t tell much of a difference, so I’m not worried it’ll render as something completely alien to what I was working with, if it’s different it’s not by enough to cause disappointment in the case of my own songs)

Another thing that occurs to me is that although there’s the possibility of over a hundred object tracks + one surround bed, well, …why not just make everything bed and not object? Ignore objects altogether and make every track a surround bed track – there’s nearly nothing much to lose, you can still position, surround pan, move things about as you wish, as a bed track – I’m not overly convinced that object tracks earn the rent compared to if they were all converted to bed tracks

If all tracks in a production were bed tracks, inn the case of LPX which has only one surround bed (that’s really all you need) then really what you’re mixing is a surround project (with no objects to characterise it as an Atmos project) and it goes into the Atmos renderer and out again, monitored as binaural, and consumed ultimately as binaural