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Man. I normally don't get into fisking articles, but, yikes. > There are over a hundred reference points in Dolby Atmos. As in this is far beyond conventional

Man. I normally don't get into fisking articles, but, yikes. > There are over a hundred reference points in Dolby Atmos. As in this is far beyond conventional 5.1. Think of a movie theatre, where the sound moves around, now you get the idea. Okay, this is right. Sort of. Atmos has "audio objects" which are assigned positional metadata in three-dimensional space; at playback, the Atmos "renderer" (Dolby's terminology) knows how many speakers it has and where they are, and sends the sound for each object to a mix of speakers that get the sound as close to the position it's supposed to be in as possible. > Let’s say you have the equipment and ability to make an Atmos mix. My understanding is right now, you send the end product to Dolby and they use their special sauce to create the final product. This understanding is wrong. I mean, I guess you can send this out for "special saucing," but recording engineers can use Dolby Atmos tools right in their digital audio workstation program of choice. Instead of panning tracks just from left to right, you're "panning" them in 3-D space. > Furthermore, they have special sauce to turn the same Atmosfied music into two track stereo. Again, sort of, but not really? The Atmos renderer basically synthesizes binaural audio for two channels ("binaural render mode"), so it's "special sauce" in that it's Dolby-designed algorithms that are doing that. But it's taking what the recording engineers laid down to do it, and they can even add metadata to the audio objects that help the Atmos renderer convert it to binaural. > It even bugs me that they’re using remixed tracks from “Abbey Road” to Atmosfy, now you’re multiple steps from the original. Correct, but let's get some perspective Lefsetz is leaving out. This is the 2019 Abbey Road remix by Giles Martin, which was mixed in Atmos in 2019 by Martin, who also did mixes for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and The White Album. And this is what Lefsetz's complaint about Atmos elides. When he writes, > They have neither the equipment nor the skill to mix in Dolby Atmos. As for just sending the file to Dolby to be processed…that’s like finishing a painting and having an amateur come in and completely change it, make it 3-D. There's a distinct element of "this new thing can be used badly so nobody should use it." There will absolutely be bad Atmos remixes done by people who had nothing to do with the original mixing and engineering, but that's not all the mixes -- and if Atmos music really takes off, the mixes will be done by the same engineers and producers working on the stereo mixes. This is already happening, and it's been happening for a few years now. And when an old album is remixed in surround, it can actually sound pretty good. Abbey Road is an example. So is REM's Automatic for the People. The old SACD surround release of Roxy' Music's Avalon was astounding and I hope it gets revived in Atmos. > Now the truth is this is a headphone genre. One, it's not a genre any more than "stereo" and "mono" are genres. Two, it not only isn't just for headphones, it's arguably a little worse on headphones, despite all of Apple's marketing messsaging to the contrary. The more speakers you throw at Atmos the better; a lot of us, including myself, hear binaural stereo mixes as different but not necessarily improved, and -- one thing Lefsetz is correct on -- sometimes worse. > Which at the moment doesn’t support Bluetooth As other people have pointed out, this is flat out incorrect. > Oh, there could be two takes, like with mono and stereo in the sixties, but that's far too confusing, we need one standard, the marketplace needs one standard. I'm sorry, but that's just "old man yells at cloud" territory. It's not two "takes," it's two mixes, and that may be pedantic of me but it's also pretty important. There's no indication at this point that anyone is rushing to make Atmos-only mixes of anything any more than they're rushing to release digital music in only MQA format. (If you just said "what's MQA": exactly.) Even on Apple Music itself, if you want the stereo version of a recording, there's a secret trick. It's called "go to settings and turn off Atmos".

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TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
It is absolutely untrue that the more speakers you throw at Atmos the better, because most rooms are not acoustically treated. As you add more speakers you get more and more complex reflections and room resonances, which conspire to make any attempt at spatialisation - including basic stereo - a hot mess. Sound travels at around 1ft/ms, so unless your renderer knows where the speakers are in the room and also where your ears are in the room, it's going to be making some very wrong assumptions in its models. Atmos cinemas actually do this with precise measurements of speaker placing. Even then, you get wildly different experiences depending on where you're sitting. Atmos mix studios also do it, because they have to. Home cinemas and home studios - not so much. If you're among the 1% of people with a high end home cinema room with acoustic treatment, you'll get a passable imitation of the full effect. Everyone else will get some vague sense of some sounds being behind them, and others not. Headphones are better because the HRTF/binaural effect has no external acoustic space to play into, which makes it far more consistent and predictable. Measured customised HRTFs would be better still. But that isn't what will kill this. The bigger problem is that good music mix engineers are expensive, and most have no experience with spatial mixing. So far it's been a thing for ad/movie market, and there's less crossover between those markets than most people realise. If you're producing a stereo mix and a spatial mix your mix budget is going to be between 100% and 500% higher than for stereo alone. Then you somehow have to do spatial mastering on top of that. "But I have a DAW" won't do it. Yes, you probably do. But no, you don't have the 7.1.4 (!) speaker configuration needed to mix Atmos properly. And even if you do, you probably can't mix like a pro. Not even close. The enhanced budget might be feasible if spatialisation was so much better that it boosted sales to an equivalent extent. But it isn't. It's a nice extra effect - which won't pay its own way, except for special projects with prestige budgets. And in movies/ads, which are a different market.

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TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

It is absolutely untrue that the more speakers you throw at Atmos the better, because most rooms are not acoustically treated. As you add more speakers you get more and more complex reflections and room resonances, which conspire to make any attempt at spatialisation - including basic stereo - a hot mess. Sound travels at around 1ft/ms, so unless your renderer knows where the speakers are in the room and also where your ears are in the room, it's going to be making some very wrong assumptions in its models. Atmos cinemas actually do this with precise measurements of speaker placing. Even then, you get wildly different experiences depending on where you're sitting. Atmos mix studios also do it, because they have to. Home cinemas and home studios - not so much. If you're among the 1% of people with a high end home cinema room with acoustic treatment, you'll get a passable imitation of the full effect. Everyone else will get some vague sense of some sounds being behind them, and others not. Headphones are better because the HRTF/binaural effect has no external acoustic space to play into, which makes it far more consistent and predictable. Measured customised HRTFs would be better still. But that isn't what will kill this. The bigger problem is that good music mix engineers are expensive, and most have no experience with spatial mixing. So far it's been a thing for ad/movie market, and there's less crossover between those markets than most people realise. If you're producing a stereo mix and a spatial mix your mix budget is going to be between 100% and 500% higher than for stereo alone. Then you somehow have to do spatial mastering on top of that. "But I have a DAW" won't do it. Yes, you probably do. But no, you don't have the 7.1.4 (!) speaker configuration needed to mix Atmos properly. And even if you do, you probably can't mix like a pro. Not even close. The enhanced budget might be feasible if spatialisation was so much better that it boosted sales to an equivalent extent. But it isn't. It's a nice extra effect - which won't pay its own way, except for special projects with prestige budgets. And in movies/ads, which are a different market.