Not sure they're doing that on Atmos tracks though - I suspect they're doing it on the sub channel and then putting anything above 120hz in the front left and right - it won't make sense to have the bass panned around when you turn your head so i'm pretty sure the mixing guidelines on these will be to use the center channel for lead vocals. Don't get mixing on the centre channel confused with mixing bass in mono on a stereo track.
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Apple Music Spatial Audio to Get Dynamic Head Tracking in the Fall
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Not sure they're doing that on Atmos tracks though - I suspect they're doing it on the sub channel and then putting anything above 120hz in the front left and right - it won't make sense to have the bass panned around when you turn your head so i'm pretty sure the mixing guidelines on these will be to use the center channel for lead vocals. Don't get mixing on the centre channel confused with mixing bass in mono on a stereo track.
Also, this may seem silly, but am I really the only person who sometimes bops their head to the music animatedly when listening to music? Spatial audio (as described) constantly changing the mix when I shimmy my head would drive me nuts. I think about those classic iPod dancing silhouette commercials, and how annoyed those people would be as the music mix constantly shifted simply because they didn't keep their heads still.
I was wondering if you were walking down the street, and did a 180, would it then sound like you were being chased by the band? Is it available with 3D TVs? I’m thinking “fad”, but I’m not sure.
When this option first rolled out for me last night, the Atmos Auto/Off switch was not working properly, so in comparison, nothing was changing. Today it's (mostly) working properly, and the difference is immense (and so far, mostly positive) on the APM.
Well, spatial audio is creating sound as a 3d space around you. In order for audio processing to advance to the point where it eventually makes virtual interactions feel real, the sound will need to change slightly depending on where you are looking, just as if you were in the same room as the other conference participants (or musicians, etc). Whether it's a net positive or not for passive music listening is yet to be seen (although my thoughts, from watching a lot of the music videos that have had spatial audio with tracking for some time now is that it makes sense as it helps trick your brain into thinking the content is "live".)
I tried with a lot of different genres, even with music copied in iPhone with Waltr2 and the spacial audio really makes a huge difference for me.
I tried with my regular Sennheiser in lossless and spatial + Dolby atmos with AirPods Max and the effect is awesome.
Lossless makes « almost » no difference but in my taste I really like this spatial audio it adds way more depth to the music I like. I tried Boom for Mac in the past and it felt fake and tiring whereas here it’s natural I listened for hours since yesterday.
I don’t know if iOS15 makes a difference from 14.6 but with iOS 15 I find it incredible. Plus being able to choose to activate it with a tap (for free) if we like it or not close the debate …
I understand people not linking it. It’s a really nice evolution from classic stereo and it’s nicely done and enjoyable
When I read this headline I immediately pictured the Bohemian Rhapsody scene from Wayne's World and the What is Love meme from Night at the Roxbury.
Dude, HRTF aka A head-related transfer function, is a response that characterizes how an ear receives a sound from a point in space. As sound strikes the listener, the size and shape of the head, ears, ear canal, density of the head, size and shape of nasal and oral cavities, all transform the sound and affect how it is perceived, boosting some frequencies and attenuating others.
You do understand you have only two holes in your head but with those two holes and the magic of our own sound processing we know where the sound is coming from. The different sound directions can be simulated with normal headphones. However, in order to make this convincing this needs heavy sound manipulation. With enough processing power and 100% isolation you can make headphones virtual surround as good as the real thing.
Trully a pure marketing gimmick. What would make a difference is high res audio, but even the super ultra expensive apple headphones can't support it, so why not give us a overly hyper mostly useless feature instead?. Or fixing the huge amount of defects in IOS!. Like overheating my 11pro Max just by writing this post!. Really, does my phone need to super heat while writing this and loosing 3% battery in this short while?
Total hogwash. High res audio makes no provably audible difference, whereas spatial audio makes a huge difference.
To say that Dolby Atmos in headphones is simply a stereo downmix with vocals plopped in the centre is a bit of a misunderstanding of the technology. When played through headphones, the Atmos decoder will use HRTF to build a genuine three dimensional (including height) sound field from the Atmos data using only two output channels - which are piped directly into the listener's entirely-surround-capable ears.
That you can't hear anyway but you know - people have asked for it so at least they've got it. Considering you can't hear it on £10,000 studio monitors you're not going to notice it on £500 or £200 consumer ear phones.
Funny they call it "the way the artist intended you to hear the music" when it's the way the mix engineer intended you to hear the music. What I want to know is who has actually done proper Dolby Atmos mixes, there's no way 20 million songs have been mixed with the full multi-track from scratch again. It's very odd - I'm actually wondering if they've been supplied with mastered stems and they've been turned into Atmos mixes algorithmically on many older tracks.
It's not that complex - it has no 3d positional sense or movement. It takes the centre channel of a Dolby Atmos mix and anchors it to a source then just pans that left and right as you turn your head.
Spatial audio is now working for me on the iPhone 12 Pro Max, 12.9" iPad Pro, and M1 Mac mini. I did not restart the devices. It eventually just appeared in Settings->Music.
I noticed the difference with my AirPods Max headphones. It sound good. AirPods Max handles Spatial Audio like a Pro.
I noticed the difference with my AirPods Max headphones. It sound good. AirPods Max handles Spatial Audio like a Pro.
Spatial Audio is probably more like moving your head during a live concert. The band is in the same place but your ears change position. I don't think it will "constantly change the mix" if you bop your head.
You're all expecting this to be a lot more dramatic than it is. The music won't go anywhere - it's just in stereo as normal - the vocals will pan left and right whilst turning your head across the stereo spectrum up to a certain amount (it can only go 90 degrees left and right) - nothing will ever sound like it's coming from behind you.
And no I don't think it's a good idea to start panning the vocals left and right just because you turn your head, it's silly.
There's a very limited catalog of Atmos tracks available right now, and much of the music has a story behind it. It's not being done algorithmically. The 20 million number relates to Lossless, not Atmos/Spatial.
There is no such thing as 'the centre channel' of a Dolby Atmos mix. Sounds are placed in three dimensional space and are only rendered to a particular speaker at reproduction/render time.
You definitely can't - at no point can you make anything in headphones sound like it's coming from behind you. It's not possible you've isolated the "behind" position out of your ears.
They've tried to do it with actual surround headphones by genuinely using multiple drivers in different places of the ear cup but it's can't create the space required to actually sound a long way behind you, you've cupped the rear of the ear off - you can position it higher and further up from the standard woofer but it's still not sat behind the ear so it doesn't truly do a surround mix - but it gets closed than just a single woofer/tweeter in each ear.
Your headphones are stereo - there's nothing you can do to change physics. You can make things though further back in the mix with reverb or bring the forwards by making them dryer, you can pan left and right and you can use a mixture of all 3 to give the illusion of depth and a wide soundstage. You cannot however make things sounds like they're spinning around your head or are coming from behind you, no amount of pseudo audio processing is going to change that. Again stop comparing "two holes in your head" with stereo speakers, you're way off.
Just a note: I'm strictly questioning spatial audio's benefits, not Atmos.
1) You can easily hear the difference between CD quality music vs low res streaming in rock music. Listen to Led Zeppelin or any music with a lot of brass percussion, and you can hear the muddying of cymbals quite distinctly, and the loss of the natural reverb of the instruments being played in a room
2) Mix engineers are almost entirely selected by artists to get the specific sound they want. They are not making a final mix for release without final approval from the artist. Even the final mastering session requires sign off
3) If i go to any concert venue, turning my head does not radically change the presentation of the music because the sound person is mixing it through a board, delivering sound to the entire venue that is meant to make the entire performance sound as one source. You're not hearing the actual singer's voice as if they were in front of you, you're hearing it through a microphone that is panned into a specific stereo position by the mixer. Which is why if the singer walks around the stage while singing, the sound stays the same
The other problem this doesn't address is music that is recorded by solo artists using overdubs. Take the late, great Prince for example. Dude recorded tracks all by himself, playing all the instruments. The final mix is a stereo mix that he intended to be heard a specific way. My understanding is that spatial audio would attempt to make it sound like Prince was playing simultaneously with other musicians, which is fake. (And if you know anything about Prince, he preferred playing alone!).
Absolutely. I know this. It’s just great to hear it especially in comparison to “Spatialise Audio” but which does indeed simply alter the pan levels of the left and right channels.
I think too much is being made [by certain marketing elements who are struggling to describe the benefits of Atmos in a marketable way] of the notion of spatial/Atmos audio giving the impression of 'being there' - yes, it can do that, but more of the time you're going to find artists using it more to get a more distinct separation of audio elements within the mix that are unavoidably squished together in a regular stereo mix. With Atmos, it's possible to place sounds much more distinctly, which then manifests in a greater ability for the listener to isolate those elements, either on a multi-speaker system or in headphones.
Atmos, in theory, sounds like a pretty interesting way to process sound. Spatial applied to pre recorded music sounds more like that fake 3D effect they tried with movies a few years back that pretty much killed the 3D film hype, as consumers walked away grumbling having paid extra for unconvincing 3D.
Than low res - yes, but you can't hear the difference between a 320kbps MP3 and the CD track. I'd give you £100,000 and employ you for your golden beyond human ears if you could.
Depends what genre you're talking about - that's quite a sweeping state, judging by your first statement I assume you only think rock exists?
I agree with the above.
I suspect we'll see mix engineers pulling out the old multi-tracks for a new "Dolby Atmos" mix of many classics over the next few years...very few of which would be better than the original mixes!
I disagree - in that case then there's no need to have multiple surround speakers either as my stereo speakers should do the lot.
Again, ears are not stereo - they cannot be compared to a sound creating source.