Stereo speakers do not pipe audio directly into your ears and as such can not model HTRF, so they can never produce anything more than a two-dimensional sound stage.
I'm not going to argue the point any more except to say that ears are not magic.
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Apple Music Spatial Audio to Get Dynamic Head Tracking in the Fall
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I'm not going to argue the point any more except to say that ears are not magic.
LOL, ears are, by definition, stereo. Have you ever looked through a stereo viewer and closed one eye? It takes two to tango, so to speak.
Good stereo speakers positioned perfectly in a well designed room will do a LOT of surround-sound type stuff for a single listener sitting in the sweet spot. Surround sound speakers exist because great stereo speakers are expensive to make, most people won't place them properly, and there will be multiple people often watching the content in a room not designed for audio performance.
Stereo speakers do not pipe audio directly into your ears and as such can not model HTRF, so they can never produce anything more than a two-dimensional sound stage.
I'm not going to argue the point any more except to say that ears are not magic.
Head-related transfer function - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
You're correct, ears are not magic - but neither are stereo headphones. The day a pair of stereo headphones can make it sound like something is behind me i'll give you a million quid and admit I was wrong - panned hard left or right and pushed back a bit with reverb is the only effect they can create.
You're right, I was wrong - ears are stereo...but not just stereo. At least not in the basic terms of what woofers or tweeters do.
Also the most expensive stereo speakers in the world can't make things sounds like they're coming from behind or the sides of you. Even Atmos speakers designed to blast things at the roof to bounce back down don't sound as positionally good as actual roof mounted speakers.
To hear things and sense they're behind you, you need distance and space. The only time i've ever had the full feeling if someone going 360 degrees fully around my body has been with rear speakers posited at the right height and volume - and in the mix they had to turn the rear panning up a little more as our ears are obviously angled and naturally turned to pick up sounds in front of us more. When it's done right it's amazing, but it's never going to happen with headphones, stereo speakers - or hell, even an Atmos enabled soundbar that has multiple sound sources actively trying to bounce them off different parts of the room.
No, stereo headphones are not magic, but a Dolby Atmos recording decoded with HTRF into stereo headphones is about as close as it gets in the audio world. There are demos freely available, I suggest you try some out then get back to me for my bank details
Sure they can. When you listen to music in a club or concert hall, the entire space impacts your perception of the sound - even though the source is entirely in front of you. The problem is that reproducing this would require a perfect reproduction of the recording space for you to listen in.
Binaural audio has been able to do what Spatial Audio attempts for decades. Put on a pair of headphones and tell me this video doesn't make it sound like things are behind you.
Dolby Atmos on Music sucks big time. There probably isn’t a single album fully mixed to Dolby Atmos and you can definitely hear it.
On the other hand Dolby Atmos on movies is awesome but requires the mixing of specially made for the format.
This is good example of proper Dolby Atmos mix for headphones. It’s awesome:
www.dolby.com
On the other hand Dolby Atmos on movies is awesome but requires the mixing of specially made for the format.
This is good example of proper Dolby Atmos mix for headphones. It’s awesome:
Dolby Atmos - Official Site
Take your music and entertainment to the next level with Dolby Atmos, a revolutionary spatial audio technology for the most immersive sound experience.
www.dolby.com
This has already been happening for some time and available on Blu-ray audio discs for deluxe remixes of classic albums. I own two myself, The Beatles' Abbey Road and John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band. I have a 5.1.2 Atmos speaker system (with in ceiling speakers for the height channel) and they sound fantastic. They're not in Atmos on Apple Music, though the recent John Lennon compilation Gimme Some Truth is, and it played back in Atmos on my system via my AppleTV 4K. Looking forward to having access to these remixes via Apple Music, as the box sets are quite pricey.
Hmm... It must be glitchy on you as you don't need great hearing to hear the difference. There's a massive difference with it on and off.
Have you tried this playlist?
You don’t really understand how surround sound or Dolby Atmos works. You do understand you have two “hearing holes” in your head and those holes allow you to pinpoint audio in 3D space? it’s not magic…
listen this with headphones and witness how audio comes from behind you… still not magic…
Dolby Atmos - Official Site
Take your music and entertainment to the next level with Dolby Atmos, a revolutionary spatial audio technology for the most immersive sound experience.
www.dolby.com
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You are wrong. You don’t understand at all how audio waves move in air and how humans process audio.
listen to this and stop the nonsense:
Dolby Atmos - Official Site
Take your music and entertainment to the next level with Dolby Atmos, a revolutionary spatial audio technology for the most immersive sound experience.
www.dolby.com
Not true, I own two recent box sex re-issues that include Atmos mixes created from the original multi-track master tapes, The Beatles Abbey Road and John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band. They sound excellent on my Atmos 5.1.2 home theatre. Others that I know of off the top of my head are REM's Automatic for the People, INXS' Kick, Kraftwerk 3D. These have all been released on Blu-ray audio discs in the past couple of years and were specifically mixed in Atmos from the master recordings.
Over the past 20 years hundreds of albums have been mixed or re-mixed in 5.1 surround for various formats such as SACD, DVD-Audio and Blu-Ray audio. Their not much less immersive than Atmos from my experience, they simply lack any sounds coming from above. I'm sure they could be easily re-packaged in an Atmos file wrapper and they would sound just as impressive.
I’m sorry but you can’t do good Dolby Atmos mix from old source (there are definitely exceptions). Let’s put it this way, Dolby Atmos has limit of 128 simultaneous audio tracks / devices / sound sources which can be placed anywhere in the 3D space. I honestly don’t believe Beatles, REM or INXS raw material is recorded in a manner that really benefits from Dolby Atmos. However, you can naturally create a Dolby Atmos mix from (technically) less than optimal material. Lots of labels and artists want to do it because it’s money in the bank from old material. However, that’s a poor example of Dolby Atmos. I have been involved with moving image projects with dedicated Dolby Atmos mixes. IMHO the need for Dolby Atmos for Music isn’t really as obvious to me as it’s for moving image. Especially when lot of music material is just recycled stuff. Then again, that’s probably the whole point.
We are listening binaurally - with two ears. So a stereo headset would do. The problem is that the mix has to be done so as to simulate the exact time difference for sound traveling around YOUR head and filtered for the shadowing effect of YOUR head and ears. And that is where it gets tricky.
In ear headphones should actually be better, since you could then incorporate the effect of the sound having traveled around the ears from behind or approaching from the side, top or front. Over ear headsets could be equipped with small speakers to simulate this, but that is an expensive approach. But still, I did listen to a Sennheiser over ear headset that was perfectly frequency corrected and filtered for my personally measured head related transfer functions. And it worked really well. And that was in 1997. And we did play with directional tracking and it blew my mind.
But, it is much easier to achieve perfect results for everybody, when listening to spatial audio through a suitable loudspeaker setup in a well sound absorbing room (no or almost no reflections).
Not necessarily trash talk. I worked at one of the institutes that laid the ground for this technology in the 1990’s. The science is sound, we know how humans hear in 3D and what it takes to achieve an exact replica. There are just some really challenging facts to make it work for everybody through a head set. And from what I hear, Apple hasn’t found the 100% solution. But for many it will be awesome nonetheless.
Personally, I was a big fan of 3D movies and there are a few well done examples. But the one weakness that they could not overcome is that the 3D effect failed as soon as you looked away from what they wanted you to focus on. My eyes tried to focus on something in the background but could not, because the camera lenses was set to focus on something else.
Impressive but not perfect
How would the source material be an issue for these albums? The remix producer is working from the original multi-track recording tapes, recorded by some of the best bands, producers and engineers in the best studios in the history of popular music. The producer can take each track and place it anywhere they want in the 3d space afforded by Dolby Atmos.
As someone who owns several Atmos music re-mixes on Blu-ray audio, and a full Atmos home theatre with in-ceiling speakers I can say for a fact they do benefit from it. The discs also contain stereo mixes and 5.1 DTS HD mixes all from the same source material and you can freely switch between them. The Atmos track is far more immersive in every case.
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I bet I have the same CD, but I have no idea how spatial audio would benefit a recording made in 1959.
Sure, multichannel audio is fun, but by gosh it is tiresome to listen to audio engineers go wild on the controls.
No thanks, I'll stick to listening to that famous recording on my Martin Logans in glorious 2-channel.
I bet you those original recording would be just as "immersive" if you just had proper equipment to hear it.
Thanks for the snide reply. My home theatre consists of a Marantz Atmos receiver with British-made Neat motive speakers, KEF in-ceiling speakers and a Paradigm subwoofer. I also have a headphone listening station with a Schiit Jotunheim headphone amp, Bifrost DAC and a pair of Beyerdynamic 880 500Ω headphones.
I own The Beatles Abbey Road on vinyl, CD, and Blu-ray Audio in high res 2.0 and the aforementioned Dolby Atmos. John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band I own on, vinyl, CD and an original 1970 release on 7.5ips reel to reel (and an Akai reel to reel player to listen to it on). Over the past 25 years I've probably listened to each album hundreds of times.
So I have a pretty good idea what the original recordings sounds like. Listening to them in Atmos was as close as hearing them again for the first time as I can hope for. It isn't better or worse, and it won't replace me listening to them in stereo again. But the Atmos version is there when I want a different and more immersive listening experience.
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I agree with much of what you've posted in this thread, but I don't think this is entirely true. I was under the impression that Spatial Audio is also applying a generalized HRTF to the object-oriented mix, to "trick" the ears into hearing a 3D soundfield. Tom's appears to agree.
Trash talk from those that don’t know the science and insist it’s marketing rubbish.
I don’t know all the science either but I’m not insisting that it’s nothing more than baloney designed to sell people things.
Atmos in music is relatively new from what I understand, so it’ll be interesting to see how it develops and improves. I think hardware will greatly improve as a result.
If you properly model your specific ears, and use that to derive an appropriate HRTF, you can make the sound "come from behind you". This is how binaural audio works.
Your ears are effectively two point receivers, which is insufficient to localize a sound by time separation alone, so the only way that you as a listener can tell a sound is coming from twenty feet directly in front of you, or twenty feet directly behind you (or indeed twenty feet directly overhead) is by the distortion that your head and ears and body introduce to the incoming sound. If you've accurately modelled this transformation, you can apply it to any sound to convince the brain the sound is coming from somewhere other than two small speakers strapped to your melon (or better yet, inserted was down into your ears).