7 ms·

Dolby Atmos and Apple’s rewritten audio stack

3 points by MikusR 5y ago

bloopbloop10000 5y ago
I understand spatial audio is the new thing, but what I want are consumer audio products that care about the time domain. Everything I’ve heard outside of the pro audio scene (studio and live) has “squishy” transients and lots of time smearing.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Between this, latency issues and the frankly soft dynamic range of most consumer hardware, I'd really like to see someone deliver a truly "professional" audio stack, without compromise. Pipewire gets so close to solving this issue it makes me want to pull my hair out, perhaps Apple will address this with their upcoming chips(?)
  - ubercow13 5y ago
    Isn’t Apple’s audio stack used professionally? What exactly are you wishing for? Why would the chip make any difference to a software audio stack?
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      CoreAudio is fine, but I've still got gripes with it. Most importantly, it's not as modular as PipeWire is, and it doesn't really expose a whole lot of functionality via the system API. It's coasted along by just being "better than Windows" for quite some time now, but I'd like to see Apple push it into the next decade with something more substantial than just spatial audio.
smoldesu 5y ago
> This is why I am trying to get the VR/AR industry to care about the changes going on with Apple Music and its investments in 3D music. Really? Spatial audio has been solved here for years, the last thing we need is Another Competing Standard that isn't open and relies on specialized hardware. > If you have an Android phone, good for you. It doesn’t sound as good as Apple’s ecosystem. If you have an Android phone, there's a pretty good chance it has an internal DAC, which puts it's objective audio quality above the latest iPhone. Sorry to all the psychoacoustic nerds out there, but AAC is still not lossless. And lines like... > Yes, if you aren’t on Apple Music you are an idiot. ...don't do a whole lot to reinforce their argument. If you're going to be objective, be objective. If you're writing an opinion piece, be opinionated. Crossing the two leads to head-scratching rhetoric like this, which makes me wonder if it's written by a fanboy or someone who genuinely does not understand hi-fi and spatial audio. I'd like to believe it's neither, but little in the article substantiates that.
- p2t2p 5y ago
  You seem to be unaware that with a flip of a toggle Apple Music serves lossless to you.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Great lot of good that does you when you're listening with Airpods or anything wireless. You're locked in 320kbps AAC no matter what, and everything goes through Apple's psychoacoustic treatment. Even if you are one of the ~5% of Mac users who's got their DAC plugged in to their high-impedance headphones, you could be getting the same experience or better on pretty much all of your other (non-DirectSound) hardware.
    - threeseed 5y ago
      So few things wrong here: a) Bit rate has improved from 256kbps to 320kbps. b) It's a lossless path all the way to your Mac which encodes and streams AAC to your Airpod. There is no psychoacoustic treatment since obviously you use Airpods for tasks other than music which it would interfere with. For me personally I have noticed a significant improvement with using lossless audio with my Airpods.
- DiabloD3 5y ago
  I agree with this analysis. A lot of this article is just typical audiophile wank. I actually own rather high end gear, not because I "am an audiophile", but because I enjoy objective measurements. I bought objectively well measuring equipment, and the equipment is beyond the most golden of ears. The only thing Apple has done right, audio-wise, in years is their iTunes Plus AAC encoder (one of two encoders that do to AAC what LAME does to MP3), and their cheap USB-C dongle (of the <$50 audio dongles, it beats the rest, although a bit quiet on lower efficiency headphones; ironically, their Lightning one, same tiny circuit board, isn't as good). Anything with speakers is just overpriced mediocre garbage. Apple has lossless now, but most of their library isn't in lossless, and they aren't even the largest lossless music streamer. The experience of their app has an awful UX on all platforms (including iOS/OSX tbh), but to be absolutely fair, the "winner" in this space is Spotify, and they aren't winning any awards either (and they don't have lossless yet). Anyone who is into music just owns their favorite music in lossless, in a format they dictate, in software they dictate.
fredoralive 5y ago
Of course a cynical view is a lot of these new Atmos mixes will be shoddily made semi automated creations, a modern version of the faux stereo of the 1960s where they just delayed one channel slightly.
thr0wawayf00 5y ago
This sounds really exciting until I start seeing stuff like this: > Yes, if you aren’t on Apple Music you are an idiot. I tried Apple Music a couple years ago and switched back to Spotify after my free trial because I strongly preferred Spotify's UX over Apple Music, which mattered to me because Spotify is easily my most-used app. I'm not gonna sit there and chide anyone for preferring Apple Music over Spotify, but I can't really take a gatekeeping opinion like that or it's author very seriously either.
- MikusR 5y ago
  Couple years ago I was trialing the big music streaming services. I cancelled Apple music after couple days, despite being 3 month trilal, because the ui was unusable in Windows. Graphic glitches, freezes, memory leaks.
- threeseed 5y ago
  I definitely don't think anyone should be criticised for choosing Spotify. Especially if they are using cheaper headphones which don't benefit from the lossless audio on Apple Music.
- siproprio 5y ago
  on android, apple music: * crashes frequently * freezes * fails to start playing songs * fails to cache artwork Their competitors, Spotify and deezer, always work.
jjtheblunt 5y ago
> I still remember walking into Tower Records back in 1979 when CDs were just coming out and they only had a few dozen to choose from What? Who is this guy, and how did facts not get checked? CDs didn't exist till a few years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc
- axiomdata316 5y ago
  Maybe that's a typo? 1989 sounds more accurate in the context.
  - jjtheblunt 5y ago
    Agreed, but by 1989 there were countless thousands of CDs.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  "This guy" is Rob Scoble, whose reputation as a tech blogger is spotty at best. I haven't read him in years (on account of said reputation), but he was widely regarded as a hack back when he was more influential.
- wonnage 5y ago
  I believe this is his claim to fame https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4333656/larry-page-teases-robert-scoble-for-nude-google-glass-photo https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4333656/larry-page-teases... Just a guy who's... very enthusiastic about his tech products
edandersen 5y ago
Do Macs support Atmos over HDMI to a home theatre?
- watermelon0 5y ago
  No. The only Atmos support is via integrated speakers on MacBooks.
- threeseed 5y ago
  There's a guide here from Dolby as to which Macs support Atmos: https://developer.dolby.com/platforms/apple/macos/os-support/ https://developer.dolby.com/platforms/apple/macos/os-support... As others have pointed out it's not support over HDMI.
- irq 5y ago
  I’m not sure about Macs, but AppleTV definitely does.
tw04 5y ago
Android has had Dolby atmos for years as has tidal. If you’re an apple fanboi just start the article with that disclaimer so people can read the article through the appropriate lens. Almost all of the modern high-end “audiophile” gear runs Linux under the covers. This isn’t revolutionary, it’s apple joining the atmos party.
- jen20 5y ago
  > Almost all of the modern high-end “audiophile” gear runs Linux under the covers. Citation needed. A lot of high end audio stuff uses vacuum tubes, and I’m pretty sure they aren’t running Linux.
  - tw04 5y ago
    Ok, pick a vendor and any piece of hardware that has an electronic controller? Mark Levinson? Linux: https://the-ear.net/news/mark-levinson-no-519-streamer-cd-dac-preamp https://the-ear.net/news/mark-levinson-no-519-streamer-cd-da... Bang and olufsen? https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/466449/linux-c-plus-plus-embedded-developer-bang-olufsen-a-s https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/466449/linux-c-plus-plus-embe... It’s not like most of these companies put “running embedded Linux!!” on the marketing pages but if you get your hands on one you’ll figure it out pretty quickly. Source: buddy is an audiophile and a Unix nerd and has torn most of his gear apart at some point.
- watermelon0 5y ago
  Can you even play Dolby Atmos on Linux? It's not supported by Tidal on Windows, and I don't think any other streaming platform with native Windows app offers it. Additionally, Linux is more or less just an implementation detail mostly only relevant to OEMs, everyone else uses abstractions provided by Google, so even if Atmos is supported there, it doesn't mean much for the general Linux.
  - tw04 5y ago
    I guess that depends on how you define Linux. It works on android, shieldtv, firetv, and other googletv enabled televisions. That’s not really the point I was making anyway. My point was his insinuation that Apple has the market cornered on high end audio is absurd. The audiophile devices themselves are built on Linux not OSX. And android has had Dolby for years, so it isn’t something brand new as he’s implying, it’s just new to Apple. And yes, it is supported on windows and has been for some time, you need to use the tidal app from the windows App Store: https://www.reddit.com/r/TIdaL/comments/gnkaaq/dolby_atmos_on_windows_10/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TIdaL/comments/gnkaaq/dolby_atmos_o...
nippoo 5y ago
This article is high on audiophile waffle and low on substance! Atmos-for-the-home is a fad that's being heavily pushed by music studios. It makes total sense for movies (the concept of an object-based audio standard which gets rendered to however many speakers are in your theatre saves a huge amount of hassle on mixing and QCing dozens of mixes in LCR, 5.1, 7.1... 22.2, etc) but for most people who aren't sitting in a purpose-built listening room it has very limited utility. If you've got a single "Atmos" speaker in the corner of your kitchen, should it really attempt to spatialise the audio coming from your shelf? Even if you put speakers all around your living room, unless there's a defined "centre" position it doesn't make much sense. Headphones are even worse. Do you ignore head-tracking information (in which case the binaural downmix will almost certainly be worse than a properly rendered stereo mix - just switch from stereo to Atmos on Apple Music on headphones for an example - the stereo versions almost all sound better) or use head-tracking information in real time (in which case, turn a corner while you're walking and suddenly the lead vocal is coming from the left)? Atmos/object-based mixing is a very sensible evolution in pro audio, for sure. But Atmos on an iPhone speaker is a weird bit of marketing that doesn't really make much sense...
- acdha 5y ago
  > This article is high on audiophile waffle and low on substance! This is standard Scoble: he’s a professional promoter who’s made a living sounding excited about how The! World! Is! Changing! Even before the sexual harassment news a couple years back he’d lost a lot of following because there are primary sources you could go directly to instead.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  I suspect the "Atmos" name is being used beyond the context of object-based (i.e. video game like) audio. At least on my Android phone, it just sounds like a bit of EQ and some cross-stereo mixing.
  - rzzzt 5y ago
    Windows Media Player had a similar effect for playback, then branded as SRS Wow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Retrieval_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Retrieval_System
rys 5y ago
Maybe it wasn’t meant to be taken literally, but it’s difficult to believe he listened to tens of thousands of tracks, which would amount to almost 10 weeks of non-stop music on the conservative end of an estimate.
wodenokoto 5y ago
Why does this guy seem to think live concerts and musicals are the yard stick of sound quality? Standing front-row at a stadium concert, a festival tent or a local live-house isn't exactly great sounding audio. It's an experience, yes, but there's a reason people tend to buy studio recordings over live recordings. Reading the rest of this blog post makes me want to cancel my apple music subscription.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  > there's a reason people tend to buy studio recordings over live recordings. There are live recordings and there are proper live recordings. The second one is very hard to do, and very hard to find. Blind Guardian, Metallica, Manowar, Iron Maiden, Iced Earth and Pink Martini tend to do this right IME. Classical performances are another category, but the environment is utterly different in these.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  Why did you bring up recordings of live events? The comparison is with actually being there live in person.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Last concert I was at (Red Hot Chili Peppers) live in person the audio was so bad I could not even make out the words. It was literally just noise with a drumbeat.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Live is often worse than a sound-board recording of the same show. Too many concerts have audio “engineers” who think the job consists of cranking a knob up to 11 – I basically stopped going to big shows in San Diego when I realized that the popular venues were totally okay with letting the speakers distort horribly all night. Unless the band had better standards it just wasn’t worth it.
  - wodenokoto 5y ago
    How else would you argue that people in general go to concerts for the experience and not the sound? By saying that when you remove the experience people aren’t really that interested.
concinds 5y ago
Apple's doing very impressing stuff with audio, and it's interesting to see just how strategically strong Apple is (when you realize the link between Dolby and Spacial Audio, and the future Apple VR/AR headsets). But I still switched back to Spotify a week ago because there's appwide back and forward buttons, you can subscribe to song stations and they're refreshed often, better music discovery (there's no daily mixes or discover weekly on Apple Music), Spotify Connect, much better playlist management (not forced-alphabetical sorting, visible song recommendations within playlists as opposed to an opaque "infinity play" thing. I love music and I've been using Spotify since ~2010, then Apple Music since 2018, and I'd almost stopped listening to music after a few years using Apple Music exclusively. I prefer playing back on my Mac, and controlling playback on my phone. The worse music discovery and orders-of-magnitude lesser amount of shared public playlists on Apple Music (on Spotify, your playlists are public by default, on Apple Music they're private; I liked adding total strangers' playlists and discovering music that way) made it so that on Apple Music, I oftened just kept listening to the same music over and over again, until eventually I played music only an hour or two per month. After switching back to Spotify I'm finally enjoying music again, and listening every day. All because Apple couldn't get the basics right. Corporate strategy that's well coordinated from the top is an immensely powerful thing, but Apple's execution has been extremely lacking in some areas. They don't have the best Email, don't have the best productivity suite except for Keynote, don't have the best books app/store (can't sync book & audiobook like on Kindle), don't have the best Maps, don't have the best movie streaming service (despite Foundation & Stewart's great show), don't have the best browser, all their webapps are very poor; and on and on. That's all a culture issue. Spotify doesn't have lyrics, or Hi-Fi (yet, and will likely have to make it a paid upgrade) because Spotify's literally can't afford lyrics and other stuff right now. Yet they still execute better, on the basic user experience, than Apple. Strategy is vastly overrated when you don't execute well (anymore).
- viktorcode 5y ago
  > (there's no daily mixes or discover weekly on Apple Music) There's "new music" station which is updated weekly based on listening history. Also I get additional recommended stations in genres I tend to listen to. Is it close to discover on Spotify?
drummer 5y ago
No amount of audio improvements are going to make me use a platform that scans my nudes and progressively invades my privacy.
- viktorcode 5y ago
  Apple Music is accessible on Android
  - threeseed 5y ago
    Google also scans your nudes. In fact every cloud provider that you upload your images to does.
InTheArena 5y ago
I’ve been a die hard Spotify fan, and since I need a lot of the Apple ecosystem, still pay for the Apple + subscription, so I get Apple Music for free. I just pulled up Hamilton on Atmos on my Sonos ARC, subwoofer, and two cheap IKEA speakers for rears. It’s stunning. It’s also quite good coming out of my AirPods Pro, despite how crappy those speakers are. A friend of mine recently opined that Spatial Audio couldn’t be all that, because after all “what does apple know about audio?” Its good to see Apple back in the game since the iPod.
devnulll 5y ago
Atmos for music is - I hate to say it - just a fad, at least for now. Nothing touches a good stereo recording. Not the latest Atmos mixes from The Weekend, not a remaster from Rush or REM, and certainly not the weird Atmos versions of old Mono recordings from Miles Davis. Now, XBox / PS5 gaming is a different story. Playing Assassin's Creed, or some of the other modern Atmos games, is pretty stunning. I'm fortunate enough to have a purpose built Dolby Atmos theater. I've spent hours calibrating it, listening to MQA Audio via Tidal, Atmos over Apple Music, and top-quality Blu-Ray Audio (The Wall, etc). There's really no question that good 'ol Stereo is still king. Purely for science, I've spent hours and hours testing - and seeing which cognac and whiskey's best match which songs. :)
rasz 5y ago
technical evangelist = used car salesman

3 points by MikusR 5y ago

I understand spatial audio is the new thing, but what I want are consumer audio products that care about the time domain. Everything I’ve heard outside of the pro audio scene (studio and live) has “squishy” transients and lots of time smearing.

smoldesu 5y ago
Between this, latency issues and the frankly soft dynamic range of most consumer hardware, I'd really like to see someone deliver a truly "professional" audio stack, without compromise. Pipewire gets so close to solving this issue it makes me want to pull my hair out, perhaps Apple will address this with their upcoming chips(?)
- ubercow13 5y ago
  Isn’t Apple’s audio stack used professionally? What exactly are you wishing for? Why would the chip make any difference to a software audio stack?
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    CoreAudio is fine, but I've still got gripes with it. Most importantly, it's not as modular as PipeWire is, and it doesn't really expose a whole lot of functionality via the system API. It's coasted along by just being "better than Windows" for quite some time now, but I'd like to see Apple push it into the next decade with something more substantial than just spatial audio.

smoldesu 5y ago

> This is why I am trying to get the VR/AR industry to care about the changes going on with Apple Music and its investments in 3D music. Really? Spatial audio has been solved here for years, the last thing we need is Another Competing Standard that isn't open and relies on specialized hardware. > If you have an Android phone, good for you. It doesn’t sound as good as Apple’s ecosystem. If you have an Android phone, there's a pretty good chance it has an internal DAC, which puts it's objective audio quality above the latest iPhone. Sorry to all the psychoacoustic nerds out there, but AAC is still not lossless. And lines like... > Yes, if you aren’t on Apple Music you are an idiot. ...don't do a whole lot to reinforce their argument. If you're going to be objective, be objective. If you're writing an opinion piece, be opinionated. Crossing the two leads to head-scratching rhetoric like this, which makes me wonder if it's written by a fanboy or someone who genuinely does not understand hi-fi and spatial audio. I'd like to believe it's neither, but little in the article substantiates that.

p2t2p 5y ago
You seem to be unaware that with a flip of a toggle Apple Music serves lossless to you.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Great lot of good that does you when you're listening with Airpods or anything wireless. You're locked in 320kbps AAC no matter what, and everything goes through Apple's psychoacoustic treatment. Even if you are one of the ~5% of Mac users who's got their DAC plugged in to their high-impedance headphones, you could be getting the same experience or better on pretty much all of your other (non-DirectSound) hardware.
  - threeseed 5y ago
    So few things wrong here: a) Bit rate has improved from 256kbps to 320kbps. b) It's a lossless path all the way to your Mac which encodes and streams AAC to your Airpod. There is no psychoacoustic treatment since obviously you use Airpods for tasks other than music which it would interfere with. For me personally I have noticed a significant improvement with using lossless audio with my Airpods.
DiabloD3 5y ago
I agree with this analysis. A lot of this article is just typical audiophile wank. I actually own rather high end gear, not because I "am an audiophile", but because I enjoy objective measurements. I bought objectively well measuring equipment, and the equipment is beyond the most golden of ears. The only thing Apple has done right, audio-wise, in years is their iTunes Plus AAC encoder (one of two encoders that do to AAC what LAME does to MP3), and their cheap USB-C dongle (of the <$50 audio dongles, it beats the rest, although a bit quiet on lower efficiency headphones; ironically, their Lightning one, same tiny circuit board, isn't as good). Anything with speakers is just overpriced mediocre garbage. Apple has lossless now, but most of their library isn't in lossless, and they aren't even the largest lossless music streamer. The experience of their app has an awful UX on all platforms (including iOS/OSX tbh), but to be absolutely fair, the "winner" in this space is Spotify, and they aren't winning any awards either (and they don't have lossless yet). Anyone who is into music just owns their favorite music in lossless, in a format they dictate, in software they dictate.

fredoralive 5y ago

Of course a cynical view is a lot of these new Atmos mixes will be shoddily made semi automated creations, a modern version of the faux stereo of the 1960s where they just delayed one channel slightly.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago

This sounds really exciting until I start seeing stuff like this: > Yes, if you aren’t on Apple Music you are an idiot. I tried Apple Music a couple years ago and switched back to Spotify after my free trial because I strongly preferred Spotify's UX over Apple Music, which mattered to me because Spotify is easily my most-used app. I'm not gonna sit there and chide anyone for preferring Apple Music over Spotify, but I can't really take a gatekeeping opinion like that or it's author very seriously either.

MikusR 5y ago
Couple years ago I was trialing the big music streaming services. I cancelled Apple music after couple days, despite being 3 month trilal, because the ui was unusable in Windows. Graphic glitches, freezes, memory leaks.
threeseed 5y ago
I definitely don't think anyone should be criticised for choosing Spotify. Especially if they are using cheaper headphones which don't benefit from the lossless audio on Apple Music.
siproprio 5y ago
on android, apple music: * crashes frequently * freezes * fails to start playing songs * fails to cache artwork Their competitors, Spotify and deezer, always work.

jjtheblunt 5y ago

> I still remember walking into Tower Records back in 1979 when CDs were just coming out and they only had a few dozen to choose from What? Who is this guy, and how did facts not get checked? CDs didn't exist till a few years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc

axiomdata316 5y ago
Maybe that's a typo? 1989 sounds more accurate in the context.
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  Agreed, but by 1989 there were countless thousands of CDs.
gnicholas 5y ago
"This guy" is Rob Scoble, whose reputation as a tech blogger is spotty at best. I haven't read him in years (on account of said reputation), but he was widely regarded as a hack back when he was more influential.
wonnage 5y ago
I believe this is his claim to fame https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4333656/larry-page-teases-robert-scoble-for-nude-google-glass-photo https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4333656/larry-page-teases... Just a guy who's... very enthusiastic about his tech products

edandersen 5y ago

Do Macs support Atmos over HDMI to a home theatre?

watermelon0 5y ago
No. The only Atmos support is via integrated speakers on MacBooks.
threeseed 5y ago
There's a guide here from Dolby as to which Macs support Atmos: https://developer.dolby.com/platforms/apple/macos/os-support/ https://developer.dolby.com/platforms/apple/macos/os-support... As others have pointed out it's not support over HDMI.
irq 5y ago
I’m not sure about Macs, but AppleTV definitely does.

tw04 5y ago

Android has had Dolby atmos for years as has tidal. If you’re an apple fanboi just start the article with that disclaimer so people can read the article through the appropriate lens. Almost all of the modern high-end “audiophile” gear runs Linux under the covers. This isn’t revolutionary, it’s apple joining the atmos party.

jen20 5y ago
> Almost all of the modern high-end “audiophile” gear runs Linux under the covers. Citation needed. A lot of high end audio stuff uses vacuum tubes, and I’m pretty sure they aren’t running Linux.
- tw04 5y ago
  Ok, pick a vendor and any piece of hardware that has an electronic controller? Mark Levinson? Linux: https://the-ear.net/news/mark-levinson-no-519-streamer-cd-dac-preamp https://the-ear.net/news/mark-levinson-no-519-streamer-cd-da... Bang and olufsen? https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/466449/linux-c-plus-plus-embedded-developer-bang-olufsen-a-s https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/466449/linux-c-plus-plus-embe... It’s not like most of these companies put “running embedded Linux!!” on the marketing pages but if you get your hands on one you’ll figure it out pretty quickly. Source: buddy is an audiophile and a Unix nerd and has torn most of his gear apart at some point.
watermelon0 5y ago
Can you even play Dolby Atmos on Linux? It's not supported by Tidal on Windows, and I don't think any other streaming platform with native Windows app offers it. Additionally, Linux is more or less just an implementation detail mostly only relevant to OEMs, everyone else uses abstractions provided by Google, so even if Atmos is supported there, it doesn't mean much for the general Linux.
- tw04 5y ago
  I guess that depends on how you define Linux. It works on android, shieldtv, firetv, and other googletv enabled televisions. That’s not really the point I was making anyway. My point was his insinuation that Apple has the market cornered on high end audio is absurd. The audiophile devices themselves are built on Linux not OSX. And android has had Dolby for years, so it isn’t something brand new as he’s implying, it’s just new to Apple. And yes, it is supported on windows and has been for some time, you need to use the tidal app from the windows App Store: https://www.reddit.com/r/TIdaL/comments/gnkaaq/dolby_atmos_on_windows_10/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TIdaL/comments/gnkaaq/dolby_atmos_o...

nippoo 5y ago

This article is high on audiophile waffle and low on substance! Atmos-for-the-home is a fad that's being heavily pushed by music studios. It makes total sense for movies (the concept of an object-based audio standard which gets rendered to however many speakers are in your theatre saves a huge amount of hassle on mixing and QCing dozens of mixes in LCR, 5.1, 7.1... 22.2, etc) but for most people who aren't sitting in a purpose-built listening room it has very limited utility. If you've got a single "Atmos" speaker in the corner of your kitchen, should it really attempt to spatialise the audio coming from your shelf? Even if you put speakers all around your living room, unless there's a defined "centre" position it doesn't make much sense. Headphones are even worse. Do you ignore head-tracking information (in which case the binaural downmix will almost certainly be worse than a properly rendered stereo mix - just switch from stereo to Atmos on Apple Music on headphones for an example - the stereo versions almost all sound better) or use head-tracking information in real time (in which case, turn a corner while you're walking and suddenly the lead vocal is coming from the left)? Atmos/object-based mixing is a very sensible evolution in pro audio, for sure. But Atmos on an iPhone speaker is a weird bit of marketing that doesn't really make much sense...

acdha 5y ago
> This article is high on audiophile waffle and low on substance! This is standard Scoble: he’s a professional promoter who’s made a living sounding excited about how The! World! Is! Changing! Even before the sexual harassment news a couple years back he’d lost a lot of following because there are primary sources you could go directly to instead.
nitrogen 5y ago
I suspect the "Atmos" name is being used beyond the context of object-based (i.e. video game like) audio. At least on my Android phone, it just sounds like a bit of EQ and some cross-stereo mixing.
- rzzzt 5y ago
  Windows Media Player had a similar effect for playback, then branded as SRS Wow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Retrieval_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Retrieval_System

rys 5y ago

Maybe it wasn’t meant to be taken literally, but it’s difficult to believe he listened to tens of thousands of tracks, which would amount to almost 10 weeks of non-stop music on the conservative end of an estimate.

wodenokoto 5y ago

Why does this guy seem to think live concerts and musicals are the yard stick of sound quality? Standing front-row at a stadium concert, a festival tent or a local live-house isn't exactly great sounding audio. It's an experience, yes, but there's a reason people tend to buy studio recordings over live recordings. Reading the rest of this blog post makes me want to cancel my apple music subscription.

bayindirh 5y ago
> there's a reason people tend to buy studio recordings over live recordings. There are live recordings and there are proper live recordings. The second one is very hard to do, and very hard to find. Blind Guardian, Metallica, Manowar, Iron Maiden, Iced Earth and Pink Martini tend to do this right IME. Classical performances are another category, but the environment is utterly different in these.
josephcsible 5y ago
Why did you bring up recordings of live events? The comparison is with actually being there live in person.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Last concert I was at (Red Hot Chili Peppers) live in person the audio was so bad I could not even make out the words. It was literally just noise with a drumbeat.
- acdha 5y ago
  Live is often worse than a sound-board recording of the same show. Too many concerts have audio “engineers” who think the job consists of cranking a knob up to 11 – I basically stopped going to big shows in San Diego when I realized that the popular venues were totally okay with letting the speakers distort horribly all night. Unless the band had better standards it just wasn’t worth it.
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  How else would you argue that people in general go to concerts for the experience and not the sound? By saying that when you remove the experience people aren’t really that interested.

concinds 5y ago

Apple's doing very impressing stuff with audio, and it's interesting to see just how strategically strong Apple is (when you realize the link between Dolby and Spacial Audio, and the future Apple VR/AR headsets). But I still switched back to Spotify a week ago because there's appwide back and forward buttons, you can subscribe to song stations and they're refreshed often, better music discovery (there's no daily mixes or discover weekly on Apple Music), Spotify Connect, much better playlist management (not forced-alphabetical sorting, visible song recommendations within playlists as opposed to an opaque "infinity play" thing. I love music and I've been using Spotify since ~2010, then Apple Music since 2018, and I'd almost stopped listening to music after a few years using Apple Music exclusively. I prefer playing back on my Mac, and controlling playback on my phone. The worse music discovery and orders-of-magnitude lesser amount of shared public playlists on Apple Music (on Spotify, your playlists are public by default, on Apple Music they're private; I liked adding total strangers' playlists and discovering music that way) made it so that on Apple Music, I oftened just kept listening to the same music over and over again, until eventually I played music only an hour or two per month. After switching back to Spotify I'm finally enjoying music again, and listening every day. All because Apple couldn't get the basics right. Corporate strategy that's well coordinated from the top is an immensely powerful thing, but Apple's execution has been extremely lacking in some areas. They don't have the best Email, don't have the best productivity suite except for Keynote, don't have the best books app/store (can't sync book & audiobook like on Kindle), don't have the best Maps, don't have the best movie streaming service (despite Foundation & Stewart's great show), don't have the best browser, all their webapps are very poor; and on and on. That's all a culture issue. Spotify doesn't have lyrics, or Hi-Fi (yet, and will likely have to make it a paid upgrade) because Spotify's literally can't afford lyrics and other stuff right now. Yet they still execute better, on the basic user experience, than Apple. Strategy is vastly overrated when you don't execute well (anymore).

viktorcode 5y ago
> (there's no daily mixes or discover weekly on Apple Music) There's "new music" station which is updated weekly based on listening history. Also I get additional recommended stations in genres I tend to listen to. Is it close to discover on Spotify?

drummer 5y ago

No amount of audio improvements are going to make me use a platform that scans my nudes and progressively invades my privacy.

viktorcode 5y ago
Apple Music is accessible on Android
- threeseed 5y ago
  Google also scans your nudes. In fact every cloud provider that you upload your images to does.

InTheArena 5y ago

I’ve been a die hard Spotify fan, and since I need a lot of the Apple ecosystem, still pay for the Apple + subscription, so I get Apple Music for free. I just pulled up Hamilton on Atmos on my Sonos ARC, subwoofer, and two cheap IKEA speakers for rears. It’s stunning. It’s also quite good coming out of my AirPods Pro, despite how crappy those speakers are. A friend of mine recently opined that Spatial Audio couldn’t be all that, because after all “what does apple know about audio?” Its good to see Apple back in the game since the iPod.

devnulll 5y ago

Atmos for music is - I hate to say it - just a fad, at least for now. Nothing touches a good stereo recording. Not the latest Atmos mixes from The Weekend, not a remaster from Rush or REM, and certainly not the weird Atmos versions of old Mono recordings from Miles Davis. Now, XBox / PS5 gaming is a different story. Playing Assassin's Creed, or some of the other modern Atmos games, is pretty stunning. I'm fortunate enough to have a purpose built Dolby Atmos theater. I've spent hours calibrating it, listening to MQA Audio via Tidal, Atmos over Apple Music, and top-quality Blu-Ray Audio (The Wall, etc). There's really no question that good 'ol Stereo is still king. Purely for science, I've spent hours and hours testing - and seeing which cognac and whiskey's best match which songs. :)

rasz 5y ago

technical evangelist = used car salesman