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Can't find it now but recall an Eno quote about loathing audiophiles because they use your music to listen to their system. 3D sound with be tech? Like really?

by harry8 3y ago

Can't find it now but recall an Eno quote about loathing audiophiles because they use your music to listen to their system. 3D sound with be tech? Like really? I don't remember Eno being an idiot. He's aware of the existence of stereo headphones and that they are not new tech. Does he think the rest of us are stupid enough to swallow this BS whole? I guess we all gotta get paid and this is relatively harmless.

ruraljuror 3y ago
Are you saying that Atmos and Spatial Audio are snake oil, no different than ordinary stereo headphones? If so, seems like Eno would be very low on the list of offenders--though I don't buy it.
- piva00 3y ago
  For music it's pretty much snake oil. Benn Jordan has a good take on it [0]. [0] https://youtu.be/5Dw3aKbw5Wo https://youtu.be/5Dw3aKbw5Wo
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    That's a great video. If I recall from watching it when the video came out - Atmos is much more of a marketing thing. Converting old stereo tracks to Atmos is pure snake oil, and from a technical perspective even when you know what you are doing it's hard to get an Atmos stream connected to an Atmos player connected to Atmos speakers so you can easily end up with the system falling back to stereo. Even when you get it working, the technical benefits are questionable and again you have the issue that most music in existence was authored for stereo, and trying to modify that audio to produce some kind of effect on Atmos is going to be arbitrarily messing with a musician's intent and probably produce a worse result. It is easy to hear the technical claims and think "okay that makes sense" but what I like about the video is that Benn Jordan explores the actual implementation as a regular consumer, finds complexity in deployment, finally gets it working and then talks about the musical merits as a music producer and musician. I believe he also finds Atmos versions of his own tracks which have been created by the streaming service, and talks about how basically they are not an improvement.
  - harry8 3y ago
    Wow, knew next to nothing about atmos before today. He does a good job, and he really didn't miss. I like him.
- harry8 3y ago
  I'm saying that if you want to make 3D soundscapes, we've had that tech for many decades. Headphones work for this. But I'll continue and say headphones /will/ also be superior for that purpose to anything using speakers. If you want to try it, get a couple of microphones and put them in a styrophoam mannequin head where the ears would go. Stick some hair on, a nose. Use it to record the left and right channel as you wander around somewhere with some noise sources. Listen to the playback using stereo headphones. It's a very cool, low-tech thing to do. I think I did it as a kid with a cassette recorder. Are you saying any of that is wrong? That whatever Atmos is will get the mix to your left and right ear better than headphones to achieve a 3d sound?
  - jcpst 3y ago
    I have an idea. Let’s describe binaural recording, but then not mention it by name. Let’s also say that all of the specialists and engineers that designed atmos didn’t really create anything different and weren’t aware they could just make binaural recordings. Here’s something that’s a big deal- when you mix a stereo recording, you can pan the audio tracks left or right. When you work with something like atmos or a surround system, you have control of where that sounds sits in a spacial field, which then gets played through those cans on the left and right side of the head. It’s different.
    - harry8 3y ago
      Is that what it is called? Binaural? Like bi="2" and aural="relating to the ear or the sense of hearing." First I've heard the term is today, I guess it makes sense as it will only work with 2 ears, just like stereo. But yeah check out the power of my ignorance - everyone understands exactly what I'm talking about and nobody is gate-keeping with jargon. Cool huh? Not by design but that worked well. So Atmos, never said anything about it other than if you want to make 3d soundscapes as Eno claims, he could have done this anytime in the past 4 decades at least. Wikipedia: "Following the release of Atmos for the cinema market, a variety of consumer technologies have been released under the Atmos brand, using in-ceiling and up-firing speakers." -- Now that sounds like tech using speakers to make sound to me but maybe you know better and can correct wikipedia on the point? Wikipedia really relies on experts to correct it to be good. Headphones work better for 3d sound than speakers and have for decades. IMHO Eno would be well aware of this and could have made 3d soundscape albums or versions anytime before now. And it's a great idea, I love it. And enjoyed doing it as as a kid too.
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jahsome 3y ago
> 3D sound with be tech? Like really? What is that sentence supposed to mean? Between the horrific run-on sentence that opens the article and this comment, I am feeling like I suddenly forgot how to read, and nothing makes sense.
- harry8 3y ago
  should have been "new" seems to have been typoed or autocorrected in error to "be." Meh. Maybe the word with the mistake and possible correction are not as obvious as they appear to their author, hope that helps.
  - jahsome 3y ago
    Thank you for the clarification, that makes much more sense. I truly could not make heads or tails, especially after the gore from the article's lead sentence, heh.
paxys 3y ago
Atmos and Spatial Audio are both a thing. You can test a speaker system or put on a pair of headphones and very easily distinguish them from regular 2.0 stereo sound. Whether or not they are "better" is obviously subjective (hence the audiophile debates), but writing them off entirely as BS is an equally shallow position.
- toast0 3y ago
  With a speaker system, sure. With headphones, whatever the output is, could have been put on a cd. Now maybe you don't want to release a cd mastered for headphones, and that's fine; getting a much larger input file and processing it specifically for stereo headphones seems likely distinguishable from a stereo mix intended to be ok for everything; and maybe it'll even be better. Some people might be able to tell the difference between final output at 48kHz and 44.1kHz sampling, or 16-bit vs 24-bit, but I can't; although I can notice a tiny difference if I'm downsampling to 8kHz to use with the phone system, but the aliasing you see going from 44.1 to 8 is minor compared to the massive drop in quality, so eh, whatever.
  - paxys 3y ago
    Spatial audio isn't about quality of sound or number of channels. Your headphones track head movements and position of the audio source and use it to simulate surround sound.
  - deleted 3y ago
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dave84 3y ago
I think you're conflating spatial audio/binaural recording with a distribution format that enables the same with some benefits like the spatial audio being rendered at the point of playback and not recording.
coldtea 3y ago
>He's aware of the existence of stereo headphones and that they are not new tech He is. But apparently there are people who are not aware of the difference between stereo and spatial audio formats. Not to mention he explicitly says so in TFA: "What’s interesting about 3D music is the possibility of making an immersive space which is capable of sustaining much more detail than a 2 dimensional space (such as that presented by stereo listening)."
- harry8 3y ago
  > "What’s interesting about 3D music is the possibility of making an immersive space which is capable of sustaining much more detail than a 2 dimensional space (such as that presented by stereo listening)." Yeah this is what pissed me right off and made me think dark thoughts about Eno, who I usually like quite a lot for his normal habit of talking reasonably good sense. So let's just be crude engineers here. Every listener has 2 ears. Using headphones and 2 tracks (stereo) you can control precisely what sound is heard by each ear. You can replicate anything a human can hear, which includes direction in all 3 dimensions of space. This is very similar to 3D using glasses to make separate images each viewed only by one of your eyes. You could even go further with VR head tracking to alter the channels based on your head movement to turn your head to look at the sound source and have it move to be in front of you - maybe some VR people are doing that too but I doubt that is what is being branded "Atmos." Is it? You can achieve this 3D audio using a technique I played with as a child using a stereo cassette tape recorder. I have described how and posted a youtube link of a guy doing it (and been soundly chastised for not just saying "binaural" which is a word I learned today. Shame on me ;) Using headphones will have a higher quality ceiling for /hearing/ audio in 3 dimensional space than is possible with speakers for obvious reasons. You will not get any sound intended for the left ear only heard by the right and vice-versa. So there it is, you can do 3D "spatial" audio and do it better and do it since a very long time and "[sustain] much more detail than a 2 dimensional space" If that is your artistic goal. Stereo is good enough to do "spatial" using headphones and, in fact, will sound better and more accurate than anything, including new branded product, that uses speakers. But yeah take it with some salt because while I like music, I'm no audiophile and am consistently delighted with audio quality I can get from really quite cheap equipment. That probably makes me a bit odd in this space.
mrob 3y ago
Binaural recording is not a substitute for spatial audio because humans don't all have identical head-related transfer functions, and because most people don't listen with their head strapped in place like in A Clockwork Orange. You only have two ears, but the signal received at the eardrum depends on the interaction between the ear/head and the 3D sound field. The point of Dolby Atmos and similar techniques is to approximate this sound field so you hear a convincing illusion of sounds positioned in 3D space even when you move your ears.
- harry8 3y ago
  Great, let's call it that then and say it clearly. Something like: This new "Atmos" is a breakthrough for music because unlike previous 3D immersive sound (using headphones which /will/ be better than speakers) this has the feature of keeping the sound stationary when you turn your head. I mean clearly, other things being equal, that is better, right? Whether that is an incremental improvement on a scale that Brian flipping Eno needed to do 3D audio on one of more of his albums and whether it's what someone needs to listen to it is something that it really doesn't matter what I think, does it? And whatever anyone thinks of that, 3D audio remains as a thing that is not new. But yeah I think you mis-wrote 'perfect substitute' in your opening sentence and the degree of imperfection is something that probably needs to be both described and supported. >people don't listen with their head strapped in place ... Relative to the sound source, when wearing headphones, they absolutely do.

cameronh90 3y ago

The problem with those head recordings is that they will only work if you're wearing headphones (well, arguably, they are specific to your head and ear shape, but I'm not aware of any spatial audio system taking that into account or if it would make any practical difference...). The beauty of Atmos is that it can be rendered properly whether you're listening on headphones, your TV or in a theatre with 100+ speakers. Sure, a mix designed specifically for your speaker configuration is equivalent to or better than Atmos -- Atmos obviously can't magically output more audio data to a two channel headset. However, in the real world, that's not feasible, so Atmos can absolutely deliver better "spatial" audio than traditional channel per speaker mixing.

harry8 3y ago
>Atmos can absolutely deliver better "spatial" audio than traditional channel per speaker mixing. Could be, I wouldn't know. We can agree though that it is worse "spatial" audio than you can achieve using headphones. If your artistic goal involves using 3D audio, there it is. If your goal is "using 3d audio, but avoiding headphones to get a result that is not as good." Which is /completely/ valid trade-off at times, eg for group listening, say in the cinema, then great there it is. 3D audio isn't new and wasn't suddenly enabled by some new branded tech. 3D audio has been a usable thing for decades and is kinda cool too.
- cameronh90 3y ago
  What I meant was that in reality, few musicians are going to release dummy head / binaural content that is mastered such that it only sounds correct if you're listening on headphones. That is: theoretical custom mix for headphones >= Dolby Atmos > traditional compromise stereo mix. However ~all content released is in the latter category. Pretty much all music released is designed to be listened to on the car radio, so all the details are compressed out. In that context, a headphone-specific mix seems to be asking too much. It is, of course, completely technically possible to produce spatial audio for headphones, but there's a reason why it didn't really take off anywhere other than video games. DirectSound 3D, SB X-Fi and A3D back in the 90s had object-based spatial audio, though it wasn't great, and was an API not a storage or transmission format. Ambisonics has existed since the 70s, and when I tried it out a decade or so ago, it was very cool - but for various reasons, it never really was practical outside of a few tech demos. Dolby Atmos isn't doing something that was physically impossible before, it's just a new codec that makes it practical to store and transmit spatial audio that can be rendered for the specific speaker configuration it's being played on. Unlike some previous attempts at it, it's a codec that actually has relatively widespread support now, with the force of a Dolby behind it to encourage manufacturers and producers to actually implement it in the correct way. Indeed, going back to my point about car radio dynamics, Dolby Atmos even has strict rules about the loudness of content, meaning if something has Atmos, you're probably going to get better dynamics than the standard stereo mix. My hope is that pushing audio rendering decisions to the decoder is going to force them to get a bit smarter than just dumping channels to the speakers. It's long overdue for car audio systems to have dynamic range compression built in. I see it a bit like NVIDIA G-Sync. VRR existed for a long time, but with nobody using it. NVIDIA brought it into the mainstream and applied technical standards to it to the point that you knew if you buy a G-Sync branded monitor and GPU, you're going to get a consistent experience.
  - harry8 3y ago
    Oh go on. You really think if Eno released "Ambient 5: Music for Headphones" it wouldn't likely be his biggest seller? "...few musicians..." Eno for sure is one, and it could even be just a different mix and can be right beside the icon for the file with the regular mix on a streaming service. I guess these albums are just that, right? Only not as good. I'm saying not much at all about Atmos other than Eno is uncharacteristically talking bunk in saying this is what he needs for 3D.

squeaky-clean 3y ago

I'm in the camp of "3d spatial is mostly a scam, just use stereo" but, without the 'head-related transfer function', (i.e. The fact that everyone's head is slightly different and it changes how you're personally used to hearing spatial sound) I think plain stereo audio can't replicate space as well for all listeners. That's why (good) atmos headphones want you to photoscan your ears and a good atmos speaker system needs a proper array of speakers surrounding you. For games it works great, much more defined locality of sounds than stereo. For music... Well I think it could work if an album was made for atmos. Not made for stereo and converted to Atmos. Another commenter mentioned the museum installations he did with music designed for a certain room. I bet those sound great in their intended spaces, I've never heard them. > You will not get any sound intended for the left ear only heard by the right and vice-versa. The fact that one ear experiences a diminished volume, a slight delay, and different reverberations is one of the major reasons we can discern sounds in 3d and not just their angle relative to our head. But hard panning like you've mentioned is still a useful musical technique and any atmos song seems to lose the ability to do that fully. Hard panning isn't realistic, but it often sounds better.

harry8 3y ago
Wow interesting. So given headphones can control exactly what vibrations go to each eardrum I guess without knowledge of your ear shapes (and head, nose, hair, etc) it would be like listening with the ears of someone else! I wonder how much difference I would be able to hear. But forget that, there could be an audiophile market startup here! So much opportunity for marketing. Listen to Beethoven with an authentic sound including 18th/19th century aristocratic wig! Empathise gender choosing which kind of wig to be virtually wearing. Hippie music with virtual audio long hair! Jazz club sounds with a virtual audio perm! The sound of a different size and shape nose - struggling to marketingspeak that one but I'm sure it's possible. It /has/ to happen, it's too perfect not to! Virt-audio ear perfection. "Don't be a prisoner to your head"
coldtea 3y ago
>I'm in the camp of "3d spatial is mostly a scam, just use stereo" That's orthogonal to what the parent claims. Their take was that spatial audio is just "stereo" rebranded, as Dolby Atmos doesn't do anything, just because it's encoded into a stereo signal to play over headphones in the end. Which is obviously wrong. Your take is more like that spatial audio isn't usually a fitting experience, from an artistic perspective (not that it doesn't do anything more that what plain stereo does or that it doesn't take extra processing logic to mix into it, and extra effort to mix songs into spatial format).
- harry8 3y ago
  >Their take was that spatial audio is just "stereo" rebranded No it was not, please try to read what is actually written because what you have reported is obviously and clearly wrong. You, me, Brian Eno _can_, regardless of my "take", record 3D audio onto 2 tracks and play it back and hear it with headphones. This has been possible for decades. I've learned today, in this very thread that what I did in the 1980s is called "binaural" You can also record and mix stereo without caring about this possibility and most do. Your choice, and especially Brian Eno's choice to make a 3D audio album or not is entirely and wholly orthogonal to the existence of "Atmos." In so far as Atmos describes speaker related tech, 3D using speakers will be inferior to using headphones, other things equal.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  Correct, I was disagreeing with the other poster but also making it clear at the beginning that I'm not a fan of Atmos, even though I was defending the technology. The rest of my comment was about how Atmos is not the same as plain stereo. But it's still a scam.
Angostura 3y ago
> The fact that everyone's head is slightly different and it changes how you're personally used to hearing spatial sound The most recent version of iOS lets you use your phone's FaceID sensor to scan both of your ears and make a personalised model that Atmos over the Airpod Pros use. I have no idea how good the results are - bit an interesting idea. https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/set-up-airpods-personalized-spatial-audio/ https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/set-up-airpods-personalized...
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  Yeah Apple and Sony headphones that support Atmos require photo-scanning your ears. Bose and Logitech don't. In my experience, the Apple and Sony implementation of spatial audio sounds much more realistic than the Bose and Logitech ones I have tried. But those other 2 still work out okay. Especially for just gaming usage. Dolby also has a windows app that can "convert" any stereo headphones into Atmos. It also works better than plain stereo but not as good as ear scanning methods.

coldtea 3y ago

>So let's just be crude engineers here. Every listener has 2 ears. Using headphones and 2 tracks (stereo) you can control precisely what sound is heard by each ear. You can replicate anything a human can hear, which includes direction in all 3 dimensions of space. This is very similar to 3D using glasses to make separate images each viewed only by one of your eyes. You could even go further with VR head tracking to alter the channels based on your head movement to turn your head to look at the sound source and have it move to be in front of you - maybe some VR people are doing that too but I doubt that is what is being branded "Atmos." Is it? Notice how none of what you describe is standard stereo, except as a base layer, and 99.99% of music available in stereo doesn't magically offer that? What stereo encoding of music in two channels can support on top of it, and the base stereo two-channel mixing and playing is not the same thing. The whole spatial experience is added on top of that. All those extra "you can just" and "you can just" that you describe need extra logic on the DAW and mixing side to control the stereo field and translate positions chosen in a spatial mixer down into relative volumes and time differences in the streo field, so that you get the spatial placement. And of course you need extra logic and sensor and real-time processing to do the head tracking. All of those are not just "stereo" the same way the web is not "just tcp", and Dropbox does not amount to the same thing as just "An FTP account, mounted locally with curlftpfs, and then SVN or CVS". And then somebody had to re-mix those tracks from Eno, using the original multi-tracks (not just the master), make decisions about spatial placement for each element, and use Dolby Atmos software in some DAW or specialized mixing too to encode this down to stereo information. (And that's just for the headphone case, Dolby Atmos extends to multi-speaker setups and cinema audio).

harry8 3y ago
I didn't say 3D audio was "standard stereo". What I said is that for decades you /can/ record 3D audio and then listen to it using headphones. And yes using standard 2 track stereo. I used a cassette tape recorder in the 1980s, a stereo mic and a dummy head and it was fun. Speakers won't be as good for 3D. Can't be. And you don't need any other equipment to listen to it. Everything I know about Atmos, true and false I've learned today. Atmos isn't being pushed here as studio recording & mixing tech to enable 3D but maybe somehow it is and it's one of these things that isn't any one thing and is used differently by different people at cross-purposes because at heart it doesn't know what it is? I don't know, or indeed care. Seems like you can't listen to these 3D audio albums with your regular headphones and expect a 3D sound though. The idea that this is the breakthrough Eno needed to make albums with 3D audio possible just jars with it's pure dishonesty. Do we know for sure either way if he's being paid by Dolby? You are, of course, entitled to disagree with all of that. I seem to have run head-on into a hype train, wasn't expecting that. Maybe it was opening with memories Eno himself abusing audiophiles that didn't help.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >The idea that this is the breakthrough Eno needed to make albums with 3D audio possible just jars with it's pure dishonesty Pretty bold claim from someone who "do[es]n't know, or indeed care" about the technology involved.
  - harry8 3y ago
    Here's a floobada. It newly enables you to "drink water." You can't dispute that not knowing what a floobada is? 3D sound has existed for four decades at least, much like you were able drink water before I invented the floobada. (He boldly claimed. ;)
    - coldtea 3y ago
      This is so confused, it's not even funny. Yes, we know 3D sound has existed before. Eno knows it. Dolby knows it. This is not your grandfather's stereo, nor his binaural recording, not even surround. It's also not about the concept of 3D sound being a new invention. This is a specific implementation, with specific features. It's not some guys in the studio running two tape recorders. It is also a new supported format available for different setups and uses, including features not existing before. Nor does Eno says anywhere this is the first case 3D sound. He speaks in general about 3D sound and spatial audio, and has his albums out remastered for Atmos and Spatial Audio. I guess you just wanted to put him down, because you saw a word you recognized, so it must be the exact thing you already knew. "This guy says he's excited about this new bunch of cars coming out? My granpa had a Model-T back in 1920! And people think this Tesla is some innovation, as if we didn't have cars before. You just need an axle, some wheels, and an a combustion engine, DUH!"
      - harry8 3y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Atmos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Atmos tl;dr New surround tech with added height channels. Great. I can imagine there could be uses. Like any new tech before you've analysed it, could be good, could be trash. Additional surround height channels cannot possibly be as good as 2 channels, properly recorded and mixed to drive stereo headphones for generating 3D sound. This is key. You can't beat headphones for 3D sound. If you can't understand why then the conclusions which follow will seem even more incomprehensible, grandparents involvement or no. Best way to meet that impasse head on is to go get your headphones and find some older 3D audio and listen to its quality. Or make some, like I did in the 1980s. It's really great stuff, good fun and can be used creatively and with elegance. I don't doubt for a second Eno could do something worthwhile with it. And could have in the 1980s on the 2 tracks of an LP while instructing the listener to use headphones had he so chosen. Adding height channels to surround cannot make better 3d audio than you could achieve with headphones. So I'm putting Eno down because this is a marketing claim that is garbage. He could have done top notch, first rate, headphone 3D sound on his albums at any time in the past, did he even try? Has he said? He's releasing stuff using $some_new_tech (atmos) for which you need to buy a bunch of kit and justifying it claiming 3D is wonderful. And it is! And he never needed that new tech to take advantage of it and could very, very easily, right now, get whatever he has done with this atmos remaster and use it to release a "3D mix for headphones" that means anyone could hear it without buying new kit. So yeah, seeing that made me pretty suspicious of atmos and annoyed with Eno but hey, I didn't know atmos beyond the incontrovertible fundamentals of what it clearly can't do because nothing can, laws of physics etc. Someone else on the thread posted Benn Jordan on atmos, he's clearly done some work to understand what it is and its merit. https://youtu.be/5Dw3aKbw5Wo https://youtu.be/5Dw3aKbw5Wo What's your guess on this, was Eno paid for this Atmos stuff by Dolby? Benn Jordan claims he got an offer and he's a little less famous and revered than Eno. This kind of "buy tech to listen to my stuff" is quite unlike Eno in the past. But people do change their minds without being paid to do it.