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Same here. I knew a few people at the time who set up a hybrid video and hi-fi system thinking it was the future, but I can’t think that any of them invested in many 5.1 CDs.
I'm curious about this idea. As music-makers, producers etc. we have for a long time been encouraged to use certain techniques to improve a mix, and to a large extent make the experience as immersive as possible, by judicious placement of instruments across, and the widening of, the stereo-field.
Whatever tricks people employ, it was my impression we are always trying to bring listeners into a specific sound world. But we hear sound much more directionally (An evolutionary necessity, no less) than can be conveyed in a plain (and plane) stereo field.
So I don't really understand the resistance to technologies that allow us to leverage this increased immersion.
And if we're talking about necessity, we pretty much need none of it...and that includes whatever technology you use to make music, and to have written your post.
But I'm all ears. What is it about immerive mixing and music presentation that irks you so?
My biggest issue with it is that often times doing something in spatial audio (atmos or otherwise) leads to a sort fake reverb sound on some elements that are pushed further out in the mix. In terms of depth when listening on a stereo device that is. In theory spatial audio from a stereo playback device sounds neat, but in practice I haven't yet heard anything I thought sounded better than a good stereo mix. It just sounds "different".
I think it makes a lot more sense if you have a true multi-speaker Atmos playback system, but then we're right back to how many people are going to get a 7.1.2 system for listening to music? Even a cheap IK Micro system is a few grand, much less anything more powerful.
In my own superficial experiments with Dear Reality dearvr pro, I've found that it helps to compose into it, from the start...as opposed to just slapping it on at the mixing stage. In this way, it's easier to make things fit the 'space', not worrying why the bottom dropped out of the mix, and why everything sounds phasey as shit. Perhaps, in the same way, when artists get used to how the end result of ATMOS will likely sound, perhaps they'll dial certain spatial and time-based effects back, on the way in to the mix
Atmos is a marketing gimmick? How so?
Yes, that definitely helps, but then you need to do a stereo mix as well for other outlets. Anyway, again, not trying to come across as bashing Atmos, as I think there's potential there. I'm just not sure it's the kind of thing that is really going to take off like some companies would like us to believe.
Except most people seem to either use headphones or BT speakers to listen to music. Now they can have more immersive music via headphones and a seemingly very different perspective on music coming from things like this. But yeah..there will definitely be people buying full systems if the tech looks like it'll be here to stay.
But again, once people get used to the results, they can tailor mixes so that when folded down to stereo mixes maintain certain qualities people expect (For me, from the given examples, it's high-end).
I also don't think you're bashing. Many of us have been alive long enough to see tons of new tech, supposedly ready to shake up the industry, just fizzling out to nothing. The skeptics (Which I still kinda am) certainly have more history on their side. But the more I think about this, the more i can see why this has a greater chance of working out, given the fewer barriers to entry and the fact that there's already tech on the market that can reproduce the mixes.
Maybe all it needs, to get people very interested, is exactly what Apple have just done i.e restricting ability to be play-listed to bands/musicians who submit ATMOS alternative mixes. Any current Mac/Logic users need only pay for the Dolby license and practice their surround-mixing chops, for a chance to get ahead of the curve
No guarantees, of course.
What Dolby licence?
Atmos sounds fantastic! Only problem I personally have with it is that if you listen to music that’s not Atmos, non-Atmos music is a bit of a letdown. So I turned it off in Apple Music…until most of my non-mainstream stuff is Atmos. On the other hand, video content on an AppleTv device or capable smart tv with my AirPod Pros/Max is an immersive and amazing experience.
You really don't need a 7.1 system for Atmos, because DSP has got so much better and a lot of the newer smart speakers have multiple drivers within a single enclosure.
You can get (admittedly sub-par) Atmos from a single speaker such as a Homepod, a Sonos Era 300, or a Sonos Arc soundbar. But even if this is not an ideal setup it could still drive demand for the format.
Once you put two Homepods or Era 300s together in a stereo pair, they are capable of delivering pretty immersive audio that is far more spatial than regular stereo.
Then you have the already very mainstream soundbar + surrounds that are offered by Sonos, Bose, Sony etc, where speakers can be added in a modular fashion, wirelessly and without requiring an amp. These devices are already in millions of homes, and they are capable of delivering full surround sound using 3 speakers and a sub (the soundbars have anything from 6 to 11 drivers, including upwards-firing ones).
The tech is already out there and it's mainstream. It's not the niche 7.1 home cinema systems of the past, it's mass-market consumer electronics that people buy to go under their TVs.
What is still relatively niche is Atmos as a music format, but that could change if the Homepod and the new Sonos speakers are marketed effectively, to convince people to listen to spatial music. But the point is you don't need to spend thousands to get immersive spatial audio these days, two Homepods or Era 300s is all you need.
That's a strong statement, but rest assured that there are business incentives at play here, and some degree of coordination involving various players from publishers to sound equipment manufacturers. No, it's not some shady conspiracy or something super secret, but it will result in some embellishments of facts, some marketing trickery and tactics to suppress critical thinking by making you focus on something else (like the upside of not having to pay for a plugin). Sometimes that's harmless, like when someone tells you that their inclusion of decades-old HRTF tech in late 2020 constitutes some quantum leap into the future. Other times it's bordering on snake oil territory, or indeed trying to sell something with a perfectly valid use case to someone who will never, ever use that product in a setting where it will benefit them.
Doubtless the demos on that web page were specifically hand-picked to maximize the differences and show an amazing advantage. I've recently heard recordings from the late 70s or early 80s that have nothing to be ashamed of in this department, and could easily fool you if someone put them on that demo page mislabeling them as the atmos version. Of course sound engineers from that era could have found it more difficult to record a soloist who was flying around in 3d space, so that's that I guess...
Atmos has strengths and weaknesses. I think the biggest strength is its potential to become a widely accepted and workable standard (resulting in works that are naturally ready for future developments in sound reproduction tech), and not really any technical merits. Its key weakness is its reliance on psychoacoustics (with sweet spots & room acoustics being its arch-nemesis) when an elaborate speaker setup is not available, paired with a good listening space. When we're talking about stereo mixdowns, Atmos doesn't clearly outshine competing products from the last 30 years in terms of sound. User interfaces, workflows, standardization could be a different topic, though.
If you go into the history of spatial audio, and see the incredible work that has been done, it's not entirely apparent why it all fizzled out from time and time again. But it doesn't take a genius to figure it out, or at least see major problems or come up with plausible explanations, when it comes to the actual field of music production.
Speaking of history, I was surprised to learn how non-obscure QSound actually was (used even in a Madonna album no less), given how I never considered it to be a professional system, in comparison to Roland's RSS tech for example. Only a few years ago did I learn about the incredible engineering work that went into it and the how they were able to actually address some tough "sweet-spot" issues and those stemming from the diversity of speaker design and setup. At that point it's not something I could verify, but I was really impressed by the engineer's personal account. It paints a more nuanced picture of any opinions of QSound producing phasing or thin sounds. In the end, it could very well have been a bad product, but the very reasons responsible for that continue to lurk around today, some being inescapable physical laws.
Sound reproduction, speakers are key in all this, and undoubtedly will develop further. Even some sound bars claim to address the interference of room acoustics by incorporating some sort of measurement or calibration, and these are exciting things. Although that would probably be insufficient to excite ambisonics people
I did watch both Colt's video on the subject and I think I will last Atmost 7 years.
I used to have a sourround sound in the living room and I did not enjoy it t at all. I got rid of it. I don't think it will be different for Atmos.
I don't see myself rebuying all my cd to get Atmos version. I have a couple thousand.
I also feel it's a gimmick to try to sell new stuff.
Surely that it technically impossible...?
Yeah, the fake stereo mixes of their early stuff was bad enough…
I don't want to hear "Be My Baby" in ATMOS.
Os there an open source or freely licensed technology in this area of spatial music? Or are we headed for something similar to the Dolby NR vs THX.
Artificial Reality will hinge on clusters of these “standards”.
I’m still waiting for “Smell-o-vision” to beat “Stink-Around” for dominance in the nostril implants space. Then we can launch effective fart jokes.
No way!
So out of curiosity I used the free trial of Apple Music to listen to some Atmos tracks on my headphones, and the experience was a mixed bag.
Some tracks really benefit from the extra sense of space, but (maybe surprisingly) some don't.
There was one track where the Atmos mix was really good: People Are Strange by the Doors. This was obviously a new mix of the song because it sounded very different from the regular stereo mix, but it really was much better and used the spatial features really well.
A lot of the other stuff I listened to was less impressive though. Feel It Still by Portugal the Man had some effects spinning around your head, but the overall impact of the mix was much less punchy and dynamic compared to the original - the horns in particular lost a lot of their impact. In the stereo mix the horns are really punchy and jump out at you, but in the Atmos mix they felt like they were just part of the furniture.
Sweet Child Of Mine also sounded less dynamic and exciting in Atmos, and even Bohemian Rhapsody which might have benefitted from the extra space for all the voices just sounded less exciting.
Jazz on the other hand sounds pretty good, giving the sense that you are in the room with the players.
It's hard to make like-for-like comparisons since the Atmos tracks are mixed differently, but I felt that tracks which needed some mix bus compression to scrunch all the music together sounded better in stereo - but then again you can also say that for mono, which in some cases sounds better than stereo, especially if the track was originally intended as a mono mix.
Next week Apple are bringing out an update so that Atmos can be played back on Sonos speakers, so I'll check out how the Atmos mixes sound on my Beam gen 2 soundbar.
It's going to take a while for mix-engineers etc. to get used to mixing within a different paradigm, in the same way as it took a while to work out how best to use stereo But more than that, if Atmos is going to be a known destination, preparation for a worthy and impactful mix might start much earlier in the process i.e arranging to fill a greater space. Perhaps, in the case of 'Sweet Child Of Mine', there was just not enough raw, recorded material to boh fill the space and retain impact. I'm no mixing expert, but I'd imagine that on such a record they might try and avoid to wide a mix even within a traditional stereo-field
Precisely
The way I mix mastered my Atmos work from last year, it doesn’t really sound overly spatial and in general I didn’t go crazy with panning objects around all the time – most movement was gradual, and timed to go in with musical parts as they came and went, as if the ‘performer’ walked into a position to play the thing and then walked back as they were about to finish, or walked around a bit on stage but not too much
Very rarely would I position an object way way way away, and in general I avoided any ‘behind’ positioning except in a few situations where I put it there and left it there as a sort of contributory aspect to a sound rather than all of it being behind you
I don’t like putting sound in the 120° behind
In general, there’s nothing impressively spatial about those Atmos tracks, they are, however, more separated than they would have been in just a straight stereo mix master, and I noticed there was less of a crucial requirement for me to compress in an adversarial way and use partitioning eq, as these tracks weren’t laid one on top of the other and next to each other in the same plane any more
I suppose in many ways it benefitted me more than the listener (although there aren’t any listeners, it isn’t distributed yet, I’m waiting to find a distrib based in the UK that is acceptably priced and doesn’t lock me out of their website with stupid meaningless pictures I refuse to have anything to do with (you, fucking Horus, yes you – you don’t offer Atmos, and when you do I’ll probably still keep looking unless you stop doing that))
I’ve had a 5.1 setup for …. decades. With high hopes for music I tried SACD/DVD Audio which were mixed for surround… along with the various movie formats out there.
They were different from good stereo, but I felt the difference was due to the higher data rates rather than any immersive components. Sure, sometimes sound came from the back or side. Meh..
Flash forward my receiver died ( it was a good one in its time ) so I went out a got a new one … from COSTCO (ha ) their $300 Denon whatever. But it supports Atmos…
At home I plug it in, run the calibration ( same average lounge room, same b&w mid range speakers ) … OMG what difference when Atmos kicks in. It really does dip you in the sound… my wife who is completely indifferent to technology even asked me what I’d done! Movies in Atmos are usually tremendous… clearer dialog, deep sound … not just noises from the rear. I think it’s amazing.
Apple Music Atmos tracks are more variable… but on balance I prefer the Atmos versions!
Happily my new receiver can also tell when content is Stereo, Amos, discrete multi channel etc, and only use the appropriate speakers. This is great because a two channel source does NOT benefit from adding fake center or surround content EVER. Play content the way it was created.
I’m going to add a couple of small upwards firing height speakers to my set up, for sure ( ceiling units are a bit much for me ).
The Atmos experience in headphones is not game changing.. maybe some Atmos Apple AirPods would be different, but when I’m on the go I don’t care and I’d lose them anyway.
So bring Atmos on I say. I suspect a decent level of production capability is required to pull it off. I won’t do it… but if You can, then dig in. Plus more gear… Am I right?
Little bit of self promotion, that’s enough, oops, no that’s too much, I’m going to sit down and have a cup of tea
https://functional.cafe/@u0421793/110274925871885208
I don't have an Apple music subscription - do you have the single on Bandcamp or Spotify?
No to bandcamp, and the Spotify doesn’t do Atmos (it’s probably on there, but it won’t be the Atmos one, it’ll be the binaural bounce)
I intended to do an Atmos-only upload but it refused to go ahead until I’d put in some old-fashioned stereo files too, so I uploaded my binaural test bounces for that
That makes sense, but I guess releasing Atmos-only at this stage would be like releasing stereo-only in 1965, when everyone was still buying mono.
If you can listen Atmos only on Apple Music , and except Logic Pro x have Atmos I can see no future to it as most of people use Spotify , Soundcloud what even but not Apple Music.
The only way is to make Apple Music free , after all we pay a bunch for buying IPad , IPhone and pricey Headphones in BT ( not for me thanks ) and Apple make crazy profits. Apple lost money on Logic Pro X so Apple can lose money making free Apple Music.
This Atmos Dolby have many chance to go to the bin like DAT and many other. My 2 old sound engineers friends working on 2 of the greatest studios in the world told me that no investment is planned for Atmos in their studios and when you know that the stars like Adele and top UK and US singer go to this 2 studios….. no comment
I like it