Brian Eno albums available in Dolby Atmos and Spatial(udiscovermusic.com)

137 pointsby bookofjoe3 tahun yang lalu162 comments

Brian Eno albums available in Dolby Atmos and Spatial

https://www.udiscovermusic.com/news/brian-eno-albums-dolby-atmos-first-time/

167 comments

LeoPanthera3 tahun yang lalu

I guess there's no way to own music in these latest formats. Atmos can be shipped on blu-ray discs, and one of the very few examples of this is Mike Oldfield's 50th anniversary release of "Tubular Bells".

But most other artists/labels don't do this, so you can only ever stream it. Streaming is DRM protected, and usually limited to particular platforms or systems.

If you don't want to pay a monthly fee, or if the service just goes away, or they decide to license the rights to someone else for whatever reason, bam, your music is just gone.

Maybe I'm old, but I still like to own my music. Even if it's only in a digital format, I'd rather have a copy saved on a disk somewhere that I know I'll be able to keep playing through my retirement.

Intermernet3 tahun yang lalu

You can get very cheap digital to digital audio hardware that can convert any multi-channel audio stream (DRM or otherwise) to straight multi-channel PCM. I personally, occasionally, use an RME Babyface Pro (not cheap) for this purpose, but there are many options available. You can even do this purely in software. On Windows or Linux look at Jack. On MacOS I guarantee it's available.

As an aside, Atmos is generally lossy. It's actually a terrible format for music distribution. It's only popular due to marketing.

Interesting video from Benn Jordan at https://youtu.be/5Dw3aKbw5Wo

beardedscotsman3 tahun yang lalu

Isn’t atmos not specifically multi channel as in traditional 5.1/ 7.1, but Atmos is positional sound that then generates the correct speaker positioning on the amplifier? For instance my home setup has support for 5.2.4 channels, two bass and 4 risen speakers. Additionally you can adapt the positioning of the rear speakers and the amp will adjust the audio to compensate.

So you could just export atmos to a 5.1 mix, but that is not a copy of atmos tracks.

tomatocracy3 tahun yang lalu

Yes - Atmos has many "objects", which are effectively individual audio streams with positioning data (which can move around dynamically). The Atmos decoder then mixes these into channels for the specific speaker configuration dynamically.

fxtentacle3 tahun yang lalu

In broadcast applications, you can ship 3D audio as a MPEG 2 Transport Stream. Because Atmos and their competitors are actually petty close to a config XML and some WAV files in the actual data contained. The XML is then transmitted as just another audio channel so actually, anything that can store multichannel audio can also store those 3D formats.

It's not a technical thing, but purely a business decision.

terminalcommand3 tahun yang lalu

I discovered SDCD recently. There are many albums mastered in 5.1 channels and they are a joy to listen to.

Pet_Ant3 tahun yang lalu

I have The Black Album remixed in 5.1 and it felt gimmicky and not really thought out. I know Bjork has some of her work SDCD and I could imagine it being excellent if she had a hand in it.

PaulHoule3 tahun yang lalu

I collect surround sound recordings in 5.1 DTS CD format. I have a big Sony CD changer that takes 300 discs and it is hooked up to my home theater with an SPIDF cable.

Practically there is a lot of great content out there in 5.1 format, and the speaker setup for this is relatively affordable and practical. Atmos needs an insane number of speakers and the trick where they fake the height channel by bouncing it off the ceiling doesn't work everywhere: my main A/V room has a cathedral ceiling for instance.

I'm not sure that the object-based model is really right for music, many of the best surround mixes for music aren't about putting an instrument in a particular place as much as they are about starting with a 2 channel mix and adding ambience. A lot of what is special about sound in space is the way sound reflects off things and and a 5.1 mix can greatly improve and literally "put you in the world's greatest concert halls".

Also Atmos is being pushed for substandard environments such as headphones, smart speakers, etc. I just don't believe Atmos rendered on headphones is going sound as good as a 2-channel mix for headphones.

alenrozac3 tahun yang lalu

It doesn't. And to make the matters worse, most of the "Atmos remakes" I listened to are utter trash and disrespect to the original sound designer/team. Some mixes bring out subtle details I haven't heard before, but in most cases even those sound like they're literally due to higher volume/different position.

PaulHoule3 tahun yang lalu

I have a Hololens 1 and the other day I made a Microsoft Edge window that was hanging in space over my wood stove (scary!) and logged into my Jellyfin and played some music.

The object-based audio on the HL 1 is awesome and unlike any headphone surround system I'd seen, completely convincing. (Usually I'm like "it sounds like I have a head cold, that must mean the sound is above me") I turned my back and moved around the room and always perceived the music as coming from a point where the web browser was hanging.

This isn't a great way to listen to music though because even a very modest stereo music system doesn't sound like it comes from a point but creates some feeling that it fills the space. It's great from the viewpoint of hearing an alert sound and knowing which window it came from (given that I can have a few windows open in different places of my house) but doesn't realize the reality that plain old stereo delivers.

ShadowBanThis013 tahun yang lalu

I have no idea how you're even supposed to legitimately decode Atmos from Apple Music. Does an Apple TV support Apple Music, and if so does it deliver multichannel sound over HDMI?

I've sought out some "Atmos" versions of popular music on Apple Music with my Mac, and listened with headphones through a good D/A converter, and the results are bad. Entire parts (background vocals, for example) are sometimes drastically suppressed and transients (like drum hits) are sometimes accompanied by extraneous sound. These artifacts vary widely by recording (although it's possible that they're often present but I only discern them on songs I know well).

LeoPanthera3 tahun yang lalu

> Does an Apple TV support Apple Music, and if so does it deliver multichannel sound over HDMI?

Yes, yes.

You can also connect a multichannel DAC to any Mac or iOS device.

ShadowBanThis013 tahun yang lalu

Thanks. I guess it makes sense that you can send it out of a Mac through a USB-C DP-to-HDMI adapter.

Oh wait, I have an M1 MBP now with the restored HDMI port...

masklinn3 tahun yang lalu

Stop listening to artists who don’t make music available as downloads?

Not to mention the resurgence of vinyl (not that I have any interest in that personally).

tourmalinetaco3 tahun yang lalu

Even better, skip streaming services entirely and own your music. This directly puts your money where you want it, as physical media sales increase while streaming revenue decreases.

masklinn3 tahun yang lalu

Streaming services can be nice to discover new artists, or get reminded of artists who dropped off of your radar.

capableweb3 tahun yang lalu

This is what I do. Use Spotify and YouTube Music (but mostly Spotify) for discovery, keeping up with releases and previewing music, while actual listening happens locally with files purchased from Bandcamp et al. Artists that don't sell their music in this way tends to get a skip.

throwaway2903 tahun yang lalu

I am friends with a music band and they told me that Bandcamp is scammy and takes insane fees on digital music sold. I was surprised because I like Bandcamp as listener and thought I support musicians directly

They insisted that "80% to the artist" is a lie and those special Friday promos are somehow even worse. However they said they get almost all money from physical goods sales on Bandcamp so merch is a good way to support them.

Any professional artist (aka music sales is your income) can confirm?

the_other3 tahun yang lalu

Hardly a pro, but I've sold exactly three copies of the one track I put on BC. I got a reasonable payout. BC definitely take a fee, but it's not "insane".

I'm fairly confident that selling via BC gives artists a significantly higher % per item than selling through a label or physical media through bricks & mortar. The artist gets to keep 100% of copyright this way, too. The artist probably has less reach and lower volume of sales this way unless they're great with self promo or can get in with DJs/tastemakers in a scene.

Happy to be schooled if I'm in error, but "scummy" isn't a word I'd use for BC.

throwaway2903 tahun yang lalu

> I'm fairly confident that selling via BC gives artists a significantly higher per item than selling through a label or physical media through bricks & mortar.

Physical media is probably rounding error these days right? But from what I heard BC is good for selling physical merch including CDs and stuff, apparently it's transparent and most money goes to the artist.

But surprisingly not with digital tracks. So I stopped promoting BC as a place to buy music to friends for now.

The band I know now use some "distributor". From what I understood, distributor does a bunch of stuff mainly including promotion. What their distributor does, it seemed like a label to me but they say it's not a label... Again I have no idea but perhaps pros will know the difference.

throwaway2903 tahun yang lalu

By the way what's your BC if you are OK disclosing? I might buy the track if it's good (as I mentioned I use BC and if you say it works for you...)

tourmalinetaco3 tahun yang lalu

Interesting to know, thank you! Do your friends use any other service, say iTunes, to sell their music, and can compare between the two?

And I’d be interested in a link to their Bandcamp if possible!

throwaway2903 tahun yang lalu

They did mention Spotify is pretty bad too (worse?). I want to ask them later about the details and if they make any money from digital music. Sounded like they don't and it's mostly from merch, concerts and regular jobs.

user_78323 tahun yang lalu

Not the person you replied to, but apparently Deezer is waaay nicer with paying out artists than Spotify/Apple music. It's apparently due to how revenue is distributed (paying per total minutes played vs share of user-minutes or something, I'm not very clear.) Essentially with Spotify the vrey popular Tailor Swifts get a much nicer payment whereas if you listen exclusively to indie artists on Deezer they actually see more of your money.

Fun fact, Deezer started off as a piracy website that grew big enough to turn legitimate when sued :)

tourmalinetaco3 tahun yang lalu

Deezer has definitely caught my eye in the past! Them paying artists better is an even sweeter deal.

And I love piracy-turned-legitimacy stories. For instance, Crunchyroll, originally an anime piracy streaming site, turned legit and eventually overtook a monolith in the US anime industry with Funimation. Funimation and Crunchyroll were both bought by Sony, and Funimation’s brand identity was deemed weaker (something unthinkable back during their 90s/00s peak) and had everything renamed to Crunchyroll.

Unfortunately though I can’t recommend Crunchyroll, as last I was aware they heavily underpaid their subtitler staff.

throwaway2903 tahun yang lalu

Since you mention "per minutes played", not sure it compares with Bandcamp... If you like to buy HQ files instead paying for streaming.

Could be that Bandcamp is ripe to be disrupted by someone more friendly to artists.

Edit: good to know, I'll have to take a look at it.

tourmalinetaco3 tahun yang lalu

Deezer offers both a way to purchase and a way to stream music. They have a monthly subscription plan to stream their catalog alongside the ability to purchase outright and download in standard formats.

ShadowBanThis013 tahun yang lalu

Yep, discovery is really the primary point. It's hard to discover new music now otherwise.

MikusR3 tahun yang lalu

But its expensive. Bob Dylan songs alone is 300 million $.

zirgs3 tahun yang lalu

I don't want to own most of the music that I listen to. If I wanted to buy all the stuff that's in my spotify "liked songs" playlist - it would cost me thousands of euros.

Until relatively recently you could only buy whole albums not single songs. I don't want to buy the whole album if it only contains 1 or 2 songs that I actually like.

darrenf3 tahun yang lalu

> Until relatively recently you could only buy whole albums not single songs.

What is "relatively recently" here? The iTunes store had a per-song price since, like, 2003 or so. And I'm pretty sure I recall Amazon selling mp3s individually since at least 2005 - I listen to grindcore, and I was amused at the per-song offering when Nasum's Grind Finale came out with 152 tracks. At £0.79 a track... no sale.

capableweb3 tahun yang lalu

Maybe my "liked" playlist is not too big in Spotify, but if I paid $4 for each song, that'd be ~$2400, not at all unreasonable considering that's songs collected since 2015 (so 75 songs per year or ~$300 per year).

Of course, it's OK not to want to own the music you listen to. Personally, after 8 years of trying to use Spotify (and lately YouTube Music), the amount of graveyard playlists I now "posses" made it so I basically had to revert to buying music again as I want to be able to listen to the playlists I create years in the future too.

Quick look (~20% of my total playlists), around 10% of my playlists contain more than half songs that are no longer available. That's just unacceptable in my personal case.

iggldiggl3 tahun yang lalu

Another problem I've stumbled across is that with a number of live albums by a certain well-known artist, the recording company managed to mangle the uploads by cutting out the between-tracks-transitions. (Which means that a) there are sometimes noticeable cuts between tracks and b) you're missing out on the full concert atmosphere and some stage banter).

On the CDs those bits had been mastered as part of the pre-gap (i.e. the bit between tracks where a CD player will show a negative time counting upwards), so it almost feels as if they simply ripped their own discs for digital distribution and managed to accidentally configure the ripping program to discard the pre-gap material instead of appending/prepending it to the adjacent track.

Unfortunately that means that all official music services are affected, both for streaming and downloading, and buying the CD version is the only way of getting a proper version (buying the CD is also the only way of getting the liner notes – unless you're lucky and somebody uploaded them to Discogs or so – though that is a separate problem).

zirgs3 tahun yang lalu

$2400 is like 25 years of Spotify subscription. I sure as hell can listen to way more that 600 songs during that time. With no ads. Available on any device. And with discovery service included. I don't even listen to most stuff that I listened to 10-20 years ago.

capableweb3 tahun yang lalu

Sure, the costs are different, but so is availability. As someone who listened to music for a good while and still listen to songs I first heard 30 years ago, I rather pay more and know it's 100% available anytime I want to hear in the future, than worrying about it ever disappearing from my library because some Spotify<>Label deal expired.

masklinn3 tahun yang lalu

> Until relatively recently you could only buy whole albums not single songs.

Uh?

Singles have always been a thing, and most if not all digital platforms allow buying by the track. You’d need a very specific artist demand to avoid this unbundling.

tourmalinetaco3 tahun yang lalu

In fact, singles were the original way to buy music. 78rpm records could only hold up to 5min or so of audio after all.

zirgs3 tahun yang lalu

Not all songs are released as singles, and it's silly to buy a CD with only one song in it. So people just sailed the high seas.

Angostura3 tahun yang lalu

I don't think vinyl supports Dolby Atmos yet.

umanwizard3 tahun yang lalu

A lot of vinyl comes with a download code included at no extra charge.

drumttocs83 tahun yang lalu

The only person who loses in that scenario is the person boycotting.

The artist will still have fans, the label will still get paid, but you will miss out on the art.

I would argue the only option is to acquire and store the music using technology not officially supported by the industry (stream downloaders, then torrents, etc)

WorldMaker3 tahun yang lalu

Apple sells ALAC files for some of their Atmos encoded music and include the Atmos mix data in the ALAC file (if you can figure out how to buy rather than stream, there are some interesting dark patterns in Apple Music/iTunes Store today promoting streaming over ownership). The majority of ALAC files downloaded from Apple are alleged to be DRM-free, as well.

(I have never figured out how to get iTunes Store to correctly tell me if a download will be DRM-free or not. I'd probably love pointers on how to do that, because I would probably buy more music from Apple if I was less afraid of accidental DRM, which has been the case too many times for me.)

ALAC is an open-source codec supported by a number of decoders today and isn't necessarily just trapped in Apple's walled garden. (I've heard some reports that ALAC Atmos decoding/playback can even sometimes be better in non-Apple software.)

bleuchase3 tahun yang lalu

> Maybe I'm old, but I still like to own my music.

Maybe. Good idea nonetheless.

glouwbug3 tahun yang lalu

Remember when we had to listen to Neil Young through the Eat Pray Love soundtrack because Neil pulled all his music from Spotify because Joe Rogan said some stuff about covid?

buzzy_hacker3 tahun yang lalu

Even Blu Ray isn’t DRM free unfortunately. Hard to own movies at all.

LeoPanthera3 tahun yang lalu

While true, the DRM has been long broken, so I don't mind buying them because making an unencrypted rip is trivial.

lloeki3 tahun yang lalu

I own blurays that a) can't be played in any of my physical nor software players anymore (players flat out reject it ever since their decryption keys got updated, which I did to play other blurays that needed the update; physically they're fine, everything points to encryption-level errors) and b) can be decrypted but it takes ages and ludicrous amounts of space to rip + reencoding properly is a very manual process (back of the envelope calculation told me ripping my small collection would take several years)

It's so outstandingly unpractical that I consider that "unplayable". It certainly is for the layperson.

So I've turned to getting these from "that other source" and keeping the blurays as tokens of ownership.

compsciphd3 tahun yang lalu

theres little reason to transcode a bluray. an 8TB disk can hold 200+ 1:1 bluray images. it costs ~$100ish on the low end for a usb drive (i.e. very minor price relative to cost of buying all the discs originally). therefore its just an issue of time. If one can decrypt 1 a day (say overnight to not waste ones time babysitting it) thats a few hundred a year (not a small collection imo). and if one can do more (say kick off one before going to work, kick off one when come home before eating dinner + the one overnight) one has now passed 1K discs a year (+a few hundred in hard drive storage needs)

lloeki3 tahun yang lalu

800+ movies at 40GB a pop and we're looking at around 32TB. That is not including shows, which run over multiple discs.

Movies can be sourced second hand (or sometimes even new if you wait a bit) for around 5€, for 800 that's 4K total. 8TB is more like 150€ around here, closer to 200 if one goes CMR. Adding a 4 (or 8 to add shows) disk enclosure to that significantly adds to the bill, which tallies around 1k, and double that if you add redundancy for ZFS to repair bitrot which at these scales starts to statistically matter. But even then, 1k is certainly not minor compared to bluray price.

$/byte will inevitably come down, but we're still quite a few years away from crossing such a rounding error threshold. Re-encoding cuts that down by a factor of 5 to 10 with minimal impact on quality.

compsciphd3 tahun yang lalu

25% is somewhat minor to me. i.e. one can view it as each bluray costing you 6.25 euro instead of 5.

reencoding takes time and effort. i.e. lets say an encoded movie could be stored for free (not true but useful for argument). that means if it costs you 200 euro to store 200 simply decrypted movies, it means if you would spend more than 1 euro of your time, energy ... on each movie, its better economically to not reencode it. from my experience, one ends up spending a decent amount of time per disc.

edit: the above is just my logic for why the added cost isnt much to me and something i think others should consider. there might be good reasons why it doesnt apply in specific situations, but i still think everyone should think long and hard about it.

compsciphd3 tahun yang lalu

actually, strong disagree, bluray drm is just as broken as streaming "widevine" (or other) drm. neither has been cracked, the algorithms are just well understood and in both cases people have figured out how to exfiltrate the keys needed from devices with them. in practice, its a very similar set of technical steps for both.

this is distinguished from DVDs where one can brute force it without starting with a key.

the only distinguishing thing between bluray and streaming drm is an end user simplicity thing, but thats more of a "product" / end user technical ability distinction than anything else.

usefulcat3 tahun yang lalu

True, but it's not like you have to rip it every time you watch or listen to it. And even if you do need to rip it again, it's not like they can go back and re-encrypt the data on a physical disc that you possess.

zirgs3 tahun yang lalu

Why would you want to own a movie? I rarely watch movies more than once.

haswell3 tahun yang lalu

Plenty of people watch movies more than once, and I’d prefer to not pay over and over.

I buy movies that I know I’ll watch repeatedly, e.g. LOTR extended editions, Alien anthology, The Matrix, Die Hard is a Christmas movie tradition, etc.

TheHumanist3 tahun yang lalu

And, some people enjoy collecting movies.

Same with music.

_ZeD_3 tahun yang lalu

there's still that thing where you talk like a...

[deleted]3 tahun yang lalu

philovivero3 tahun yang lalu

Someone else posted this down in the bottom of a comment thread somewhere, but I think it deserves to be at the top level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Dw3aKbw5Wo

This is a smart, motivated audio engineer talking about Atmos. Quick summary: it's awful when it works perfectly, and it almost never works perfectly, in fact, it rarely works at all. Good luck trying to get Atmos working, and even if this was a completely open standard, would you really bother?

pnw3 tahun yang lalu

I've had an Atmos system for a few years and it works great for movies, both on 4k disc and streaming services. Almost all of the Apple TV+ content is Atmos encoded. The $500 system in that video is entry level Atmos, my system is 5.2.4 and cost a substantial amount of money.

I agree that games support could be better but that's mostly up to publishers. As for music, I've tried it and it's fine but it's mostly a gimmick for selling remasters of established artists IMHO. Tidal has a lot of Atmos music content. It seems he was trying to use Amazon Music and Amazon is notorious for not supporting Dolby standards because of the cost.

I've worked in audio professionally and software I created is used in lots of movies and music.

jwagenet3 tahun yang lalu

Perhaps you’re right his $700 unit is not set up correctly or insufficient, but the point is it seems the speaker (and headphones he tried) are basically what you might end up with if you don’t have a high budget and do a fair bit of research: the end result is disappointing and would turn people off of the technology.

viraptor3 tahun yang lalu

Feels like, if you can't get a person who understands the tech to buy the equipment and get it running correctly, there's something very wrong with this system. I get that even experienced people can make mistakes (I sure made many in my field), but if that's a specifically researched content for publication... you tend to be careful with those.

pnw3 tahun yang lalu

I think Dolby's desire to market the Atmos brand is unfortunately beyond what the tech can deliver. Atmos works great for people willing to invest in a high end system, especially for the right content, but it's diminishing returns on entry level systems and headphones.

goosinmouse3 tahun yang lalu

I'm an audio engineer who has dabbled in atmos when it started getting popular and most of what he says i completely agree with. On a personal level, i have never found any spatial mix of any song or recording over the original mix.

raffraffraff3 tahun yang lalu

I enjoyed the quad mix of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. I found that separating some of the sounds over 4 speakers helped clarify them. This works because there's so much going on in that album, so many sampled sounds throughout the album like the snippets of conversations. The clocks at the start of Time were great. I listened to the whole thing sitting in the middle of my living room with my eyes closed. It was extremely absorbing and enjoyable.

99% of the time I listen to the regular mix though. I love music but I don't want to sit motionless in the dead center of an array of speakers. Music is a soundtrack to chopping onions, relaxing with a book, fixing my bike etc.

ShadowBanThis013 tahun yang lalu

I have that SACD too, but the fact that they didn't ask Alan Parsons to do it seriously undermines its legitimacy. I mean... WTF?

I heard a rumor that there is in fact a Parsons-mastered surround mix in existence.

raffraffraff3 tahun yang lalu

It's on YouTube. Not sure if it's genuine, but that's the one I'm talking about.

Although I'm not sure I agree with you. Other human beings on planet earth are capable of remixing an album.

ShadowBanThis013 tahun yang lalu

Yes, I should simply say that it made me less excited about it.

Meanwhile, I enjoy Steven Wilson's surround mix of XTC's Nonsuch (except the first track, in which the vocals are oddly messed up).

raffraffraff3 tahun yang lalu

Oh, I'll have to listen to that!

baanlox3 tahun yang lalu

klodolph3 tahun yang lalu

Another take from an audio engineer… this one only 3 minutes.

https://www.tiktok.com/@greazywilmusic/video/722394591746289...

(I know HN is allergic to Twitter, so I worry that some people are gonna go into anaphylactic shock if I post a TikTok link.)

SECProto3 tahun yang lalu

summary of that, from 1:22: "For watching a movie, in a movie theater/in an appropriate speaker setup, shit is awesome. Love it for movies, it's so cool. But for music, it has not, and will not, ever take off."

basisword3 tahun yang lalu

>> This is a smart, motivated audio engineer talking about Atmos. Quick summary: it's awful when it works perfectly, and it almost never works perfectly, in fact, it rarely works at all. Good luck trying to get Atmos working, and even if this was a completely open standard, would you really bother?

I hope he had more to say than that, because that’s nonsense. Getting it “working” is as simple as playing it on Apple Music via my AirPods or Sonos. There are definitely bad mixes available, but there are some incredible ones too. Listening to “Let It Be” on the Sonos is magical.

I’ve also done some mixing in Atmos and it’s pretty straightforward.

At the end of the day it’s largely subjective, but I’m pretty certain it’s the future - especially now Sonos has stated releasing single devices that can play Atmos to a pretty good standard, and most new major label releases are mixed in Atmos.

Intermernet3 tahun yang lalu

"I hope he had more to say than that"

Yes, he did. A lot. I suggest you watch the video. He goes into how Atmos isn't anything new, it's not unique, how it's a basic money grab, how it would be better as an open standard, how Atmos is fine if you like it (as music listening is purely subjective), how remixes of music in Atmos are generally objectively terrible (and, in most cases, not what the artist would have wanted) and a lot more.

Benn Jordan tries very hard to be unbiased and well researched in almost everything he presents. For him to come to the conclusion that Atmos isn't really worth the cost barrier to entry is something I (and many others) will take into account. I'd say Dolby Labs would also do well to take it into account, but they don't have a very good track record with listening to valuable criticism. When it comes to criticism, their noise reduction is perhaps too effective.

It's also worth noting that they love re-inventing surround sound and charging licensing fees for the privilege to put a badge on your product ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby#Dolby_surround_systems ).

IMHO Atmos is the 3D TV of audio, except it could be good if it was an open standard.

FYI, as far as I can tell, Apple (and most others) are delivering Atmos in lossy formats. These may be good, but they aren't by any means state of the art for multi-channel. Server side de-muxing of spatial audio to the required number of channels would mean less overall processing (channel combos could be cached) and higher quality delivery using open standards (multi-channel FLAC supports up to 8 channels, and it's an open format which would allow easy extension). This would be better for the consumer (bandwidth is not an argument in these days of 4K+ video streaming), arguably better for the artists and publishers (better quality audio to the consumer), but it wouldn't make anywhere near as much money in licensing for Dolby.

squeaky-clean3 tahun yang lalu

Some folks here may know Benn Jordan better by his pseudonym The Flashbulb.

pixelpoet3 tahun yang lalu

Ace guy too, besides his really good music.

bob10293 tahun yang lalu

I have a hard enough time keeping the sweet spot locked in with my stereo/studio setups. The day I get bored with 2 channels, I'll reach for more.

A proper soundstage with a high-end stereo loudspeaker setup will typically make the best multichannel kits sound like shit by comparison. Achieving this is about physical location of speakers and compensation for any time-delay in the signal chain. Clearly, getting 2 things positioned well in space/time is much simpler than 5+.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan3 tahun yang lalu

2.1 or 2.2 is sufficient for nearly all music, but for almost no modern cinema.

The primary mix for movies is basically mono, with sound effects sprinkled around you. If you want a chance to make sense of the dialogue, you really need a good center channel aligned with the center of the screen. The stereo downmixes almost universally suck because they don't boost the center channel enough before splitting it to the left and right speakers.

justinclift3 tahun yang lalu

> The day I get bored with 2 channels, I'll reach for more.

Heh Heh Heh

If you like BladeRunner 2049, have a go at watching it in stereo vs higher # of channels.

It has exceptionally well done 5.1/7.1 audio, which makes a huge difference in its listening experience.

I only have a 7.1 setup though, so no practical experience with Atmos. :)

bob10293 tahun yang lalu

I've watched this one several times on my stereo setup. I don't think the multichannel mix would provide a meaningfully-different experience.

The most important part of the BR2049 audio experience for me lives below 100hz. I don't need that .1 to feel what you are feeling. I have a DSP engine that siphons everything <60Hz off my stereo channels and feeds it into a quarter ton worth of subwoofer. Once you have this movie running flat down to 12Hz, your "multichannel effects" will be produced by the structure you are watching it in.

globular-toast3 tahun yang lalu

99% of that is the high dynamic range and presence of a proper subwoofer. Surround adds maybe 1% to the experience. Try it.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan3 tahun yang lalu

Nah, you can't easily dynamically downmix surround sound audio to stereo. In the main mix, the dialog mostly comes through the center channel, and the left and right surround sound speakers are used for sound effects. If you simply split the center channel to left and right without massively boosting the volume of the center channel first, you're going to have stupidly loud sound effects (from the L/R surround sound speakers) and the dialogue will sound like whispers. If you're playing the movie from a PC, you can boost the center channel audio with software, but sometimes (e.g. when a character is off-screen) dialogue will come from the left or right channels and you won't be able to clearly hear them.

If you've got a stereo speaker setup, there's no good solution unless you can get your hands on the actual official stereo mix (some streaming services let you select this), but even the official stereo mix is an afterthought cobbled together by some overworked and underpaid audio engineer: the primary mix is absolutely the theatrical mix with all the surround sound channels, then everything is downmixed progressively from there.

globular-toast3 tahun yang lalu

I've had no problems with downmixed surround on stereo speakers. Never had a problem with dialogue, not once. And I've watched basically every notable English-language film that's come out in my lifetime.

I didn't say anything about a centre speaker, though. A centre speaker is useful when you have a large screen and people will be sitting outside of the sweet spot. You don't have to be far outside the sweet spot before you lose the ghost centre channel. But you can still get really far without a centre channel and it's much easier because the ideal position is behind the screen which is hard to achieve (requires an acoustically transparent projector screen). The ghost centre channel is always behind the screen, though. Some AVRs even include an option to "lift" the centre channel by mixing it into the L/R to account for the common suboptimal below-screen positioning of the centre speaker. I've never tried it, though.

Nobody has ever heard my stereo set ups and commented on lack of surround speakers. And when I did have surround speakers nobody ever commented on them. Nobody ever couldn't hear the dialogue. They were always impressed with the bass and dynamic range.

For me, the diminishing returns are something like this (specifically for film soundtracks):

- 60%: Good stereo speakers (preferably full-range, down to 60Hz),

- 80%: Quiet environment and ability to listen with full dynamic range at close to reference SPLs (ie. no kids, no neighbours annoying you or you annoying them),

- 90%: Good subwoofer to add the actual sub-bass material (down to 20Hz),

- 99%: Good LCR set up (ie. centre matched to the L/R speakers),

Leaving 1% for anything extra like surrounds etc. It's just really silly to add surrounds before getting the huge gains above.

bob10293 tahun yang lalu

> Leaving 1% for anything extra like surrounds etc. It's just really silly to add surrounds before getting the huge gains above.

This advice would save so much headache for so many nerds. The juice is simply not worth the squeeze unless that whole checklist is already satisfied and you are still not blown away.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan3 tahun yang lalu

I'd adjust the percentages a bit, but I actually agree with your 5 points, and their order.

justinclift3 tahun yang lalu

Interesting. I do have a decent subwoofer, so maybe that's done more than I was thinking.

That being said, there's no way I'd do away with the subwoofer. That has turned out to be the #1 best sound upgrade I've done thus far. :)

globular-toast3 tahun yang lalu

The stupid thing is people listen to Atmos stuff on terrible speakers. Like soundbars with upfiring speakers. Tiny, whimpy little drivers that are tuned to make it sound like you have "bass". It's a shame because if people just set up a decent stereo system it would blow those systems away.

Even if you have a decent system (that's going to cost thousands, a good room and modification of said room) the gains are tiny outside of a few gimmicky demos. In a home environment you really don't need anything more than front speakers. Surrounds do not add anything. Save your money and buy a bigger screen.

zirgs3 tahun yang lalu

Many soundbars also come with separate subwoofers - that's where the bass is coming from.

fxtentacle3 tahun yang lalu

In my opinion, the problem is not Atmos, it's the lack of head-tracking. That's why it can sound awesome on a calibrated surround speaker setup but usually fails to deliver on headphones.

I once built a wwise plugin that allows you to play Atmos and the likes on a Oculus with proper Headphone Surround 3D and everyone agreed that it was fantastic. But those consumer $0.01 ASICs integrated into mainboards obviously can't compete with a solution that has more sensors and GHz of compute available.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan3 tahun yang lalu

Don't Apple headphones/earbuds have spatial audio headtracking enabled by default? I think it even works with Apple TV (not just phones/laptops)

fxtentacle3 tahun yang lalu

Yes, and some people love it. But the AirPods don't have enough processing power so they need to send the measurements to the host via bluetooth and then the adjusted audio is sent back later. The result is 200+ ms of latency on the head-tracking which is much larger than the perception threshold at 30ms.

basisword3 tahun yang lalu

I don’t notice any latency issue generally. But, if you change your heads “default position” (i.e. instead of looking forward most of the time you’re now looking out the window next to you most of the time) it does take quite a few seconds to readjust and find the middle.

Angostura3 tahun yang lalu

I've got a couple of the original Apple HomePods set up in stereo config, and I have to say it sounds pretty good. I'm not an audiophile, but I have friends who are and they are impressed with the sound.

crazygringo3 tahun yang lalu

Is there a text version or summary? I can't spend 24 minutes watching.

Atmos on my AirPods seems to work just fine, but I guess I'm curious if I'm missing something?

recursive3 tahun yang lalu

If you feel like it's working no one can tell you anything else. But Airpods also work fine without Atmos, so it's not really an improvement.

The over-simplification is that Atmos doesn't improve music, and rarely works. And Atmos through stereo headphones is a non-sensical premise.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan3 tahun yang lalu

> Atmos through stereo headphones is a non-sensical premise

If you watch atmos content through an apple tv it has head tracking for airpods. It's not going to change your life, but the audio being centered on the actual screen a la a proper surround sound setup is a nice touch.

crazygringo3 tahun yang lalu

Exactly this. There's nothing "nonsensical" about it. It's a distinction anyone can perceive.

Now, whether you care about is personal preference. But it's definitely a real thing.

recursive3 tahun yang lalu

I thought Atmos is an n-channel audio encoding thing bundled with an ideal room setup.

Head tracking is interesting. I hadn't heard of it, at least as an Atmos thing.

But it doesn't seem to have anything to do the source media encoding. Head tracking seems like it would work with a mono source.

TX81Z3 tahun yang lalu

Atmos on headphones is negligible, but on a surround sound system it can be awesome. Eno isn’t a fool.

kibwen3 tahun yang lalu

Reminder that Brian Eno authored the Windows 95 startup sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3Ak5VgyEoc

Here's that same sound slowed down 23x if you'd like to hear a more representative sample of his music, it's actually fairly beautiful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNIfbdi41ho

scarnz3 tahun yang lalu

That slowed down version sounds remarkably complementary to his piece for David Lynch's Dune in 1984, the timelessly haunting "Prophecy Theme": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4onBqilHvc

SeanLuke3 tahun yang lalu

This is cute but I think it violates the artistic integrity of his piece. The whole point of the 95 startup chime as a piece of art was that Eno took the job because he was fascinated with the idea of creating musical art entirely within a tiny time interval.

Imagine if Walt Whitman became interested in writing haiku for a little while, but because he'd previously written epic poems, hey, let's stretch out his haiku to epic length. No.

easyThrowaway3 tahun yang lalu

I suggest you watching the interview of Zane Lowe with both Eno[1] and his nephew Fred "again." Gibson [2], It's clearly apparent that Eno loves this kind of "disrespectful" experiments.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui9TPLTV-Rk [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeD0g5xXo7E

jjulius3 tahun yang lalu

You're not wrong about the "point" of Eno's original approach to the chime, but I think you're taking things a bit too seriously and I respectfully disagree that it "violates the artistic integrity of his piece".

pbronez3 tahun yang lalu

Very cool! I enjoy listing to music in spatial audio formats… more immersive than stereo and takes advantage of a setup I put some effort into. Up mixing works ok-ish, but native is better. Sometimes the 3D stuff is a gimmick, and I understand why some people see it as a money grab. I’ve only really gotten into Brian Eno in the last year or so. I think his music is a great candidate for this format. It’s electronic first, and already conceptualized as a soundscape. Look forward to listening to this! Took some digging, but it looks like these are already up on streaming services. The Atmos mixes are listed as stand-alone albums on Tidal. I found 9 Atmos albums there.. big remastering job!

https://tidal.com/album/252763804

https://tidal.com/album/289135892

https://tidal.com/album/302633683

https://tidal.com/album/302637662

https://tidal.com/album/302633677

https://tidal.com/album/302634567

https://tidal.com/album/302634596

https://tidal.com/album/302633697

https://tidal.com/album/302633686

bee_rider3 tahun yang lalu

What are people using to listen to these spatial audio mixes? I tried some spatial songs on Amazon, but I was using my regular old Stereo headphones, so the experience was really poor.

Now that VR is a thing and cellphones have all sorts of gyroscopes and accelerometers in them, I wish there was an app to take one of these special tracks and have it actually respond to the orientation of the listener’s head. I’ll even strap my cellphone to my head like some sort of weirdo.

rodgerd3 tahun yang lalu

> What are people using to listen to these spatial audio mixes

My home theatre setup. I do not have either the space or money to have two separate Atmos listening areas!

relyks3 tahun yang lalu

How is your home theater set up? :) What's your hardware and/or software that you use?

rodgerd3 tahun yang lalu

Oh lordy is that a way to kick off a fight 8)

Personally I use an Anthem receiver (an older MRX720), KRK powered speakers for the base (5) channels, Paradigm speakers for the overheads, and all crammed into a rather small-ish space (6.5m x 3.5m).

Honestly in this space the problem is mostly around buggy shite. Manufacturers have very little control over what companies like Dolby and DTS deliver them as black boxes, so integrating these tightly-controlled, proprietary decoders (Atmos, DTS:X, etc) and room correction (Dirac) and so on, is relatively difficult. Add in that things like HDMI 2.1 have had huge teething problems and it seems like every product drop from every vendor seems to be riddled with bugs for a year or more from release.

(I also have a comically oversized sub for the space, but that's a whole other thing)

quickthrowman3 tahun yang lalu

Apple AirPods (Pro/Max/3rd Gen) all support Dolby Atmos, I used a pair of 3rd gen to sample the Brian Eno recordings.

gcr3 tahun yang lalu

Do AirPods Pro have multiple drivers in each ear to simulate the environment, or is it all just done with head tracking and downmixed to stereo with some snazzy psychoacoustics?

chipotle_coyote3 tahun yang lalu

The snazzy psychoacoustics thing. :)

It’s my understanding that Apple Music doesn’t actually even use the binaural downmixing instructions that can be encoded into Atmos music tracks, and uses its own algorithm, in a very “Apple knows best” kind of way. I would rather this be, at the very least, something that’s a setting — although as someone who’s never had any real luck hearing even the best true binaural recordings as really “spatial,” it probably wouldn’t make much difference to me either way.

The best way to listen to Atmos-encoded music on Apple Music is with an Apple TV connected to a good multichannel home theater system, in my experience. It didn’t convince me that it was the Future Of Music (tm), but some of it did sound pretty good.

sp3323 tahun yang lalu

I don't see how adding drivers would change anything. All the sound from all the drivers is going to be heard by just one eardrum.

rodgerd3 tahun yang lalu

> Sometimes the 3D stuff is a gimmick, and I understand why some people see it as a money grab.

One of the most interesting things about the fanfare around this has been seeing how different artists/engineers use the capability. Some classical albums that Apple first showcased did a lovely job of using a small dash of rear speaker to give you the sense of an echo from a church or concert hall; whoever did the mix of The Doors "Riders of the Storm" made perfect use of the overheads; Camila Cabello's "Don't Go Yet" is like being in a cafe listening to a band.

Of course there's also a lot of clunky, flashy for the sake of it, or otherwise mediocre mixes, as well.

sam1r3 tahun yang lalu

There is a GitHub repo that will let you download the original flac file from the album URL. I believe it’s called tidal - dl.

timanderson3 tahun yang lalu

Atmos is a good thing IMO. Not so much for the technology itself though it seems OK, but rather for the fact that we are getting surround remixes of many albums which is a new way to hear them and a lot of fun; also less prone to "loudness wars" excessive compression in my experience.

Surround is better than stereo but much harder to set up right; I totally get that, but that doesn't make it bad. I have an absolutely compromised surround setup in my study with a soundbar that supports Atmos, sub and rear speakers, and I love it, even if yes, the bouncing sound off the ceiling thing doesn't seem to do much.

On headphones or earbuds it's some and some, really depends if you like the remix.

cage4333 tahun yang lalu

On the back of his Ambient 4 album Eno gave instructions for a cheap way of getting a sort of surround sound using a third speaker. I did this as a teenager with my mediocre record player and a small speaker with almost no bass - it worked surprisingly well

http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/onland-txt.html

cheschire3 tahun yang lalu

His recent album with Fred Again.. called Secret Life had a version published on his youtube channel called the "10% broken algorithm edit" [0]. I wish this one had atmos as well as it would be a 3+ hour experience.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzkoi_Z34rs

mistrial93 tahun yang lalu

great to meet Brian Eno in San Francisco so long ago, showing his "infinite music" machine, a collection of reel-to-reel tapes all playing at different speeds in unison! personable, real .. a great artist IMHO

this smells like yet another MBA-style publishing effort unfortunately..

nzoschke3 tahun yang lalu

He has an infinite “painting” at The Interval of The Long Now in SF that is excellent too.

relyks3 tahun yang lalu

Hopefully, these will exist in a downloadable form. The streaming services that support Dolby Atmos like Tidal, Apple Music, Amazon Music, etc. don't make it easy or don't allow you to listen on an alternative hardware setup different from what they want. I have a 5.1 surround sound system set-up with a Roku Ultra and I can't easily play spatial music without streaming directly from my computer using a DLNA server... I also don't get people listening to Dolby Atmos mixes on headphones. It defeats the whole purpose. You don't get a real spatial experience

TX81Z3 tahun yang lalu

I have a oneohtrix point never album on blu ray that is stunning in atmos with zero compression. But that’s it, nothing else available.

harry83 tahun yang lalu

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.

mrob3 tahun yang lalu

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.

harry83 tahun yang lalu

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.

coldtea3 tahun yang lalu

>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)."

harry83 tahun yang lalu

> "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.

coldtea3 tahun yang lalu

>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).

harry83 tahun yang lalu

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.

coldtea3 tahun yang lalu

>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.

harry83 tahun yang lalu

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. ;)

coldtea3 tahun yang lalu

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!"

harry83 tahun yang lalu

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

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.

harry83 tahun yang lalu

Something else news to me today. I always thought "stereo" meant something like "two working in unison". Apparently it is from the greek meaning "solid." Hence sterophonic literally means solid (or spatial or 3d) sound (or speech). Crazy, that's obviously not how we understand it anymore.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/stereophonic

Sterophonic

adjective

pertaining to a system of sound recording or reproduction using two or more separate channels to produce a more realistic effect by capturing the spatial dimensions of a performance (the location of performers as well as their acoustic surroundings), used especially with high-fidelity recordings and reproduction systems

kevinmchugh3 tahun yang lalu

I'm also cheap when it comes to audio gear, and can't imagine buying anything this fancy. What's interesting here is that Eno has done museum installation pieces - music designed for a specific space. The point to him is not that some sound is intended to be in your left ear, but that it's on the left side of the room, and all the sounds are positioned relative to each other, while you're free to move as you please. I could imagine Music for Airports played across an entire airport - that would be something.

harry83 tahun yang lalu

Yeah totally. I've had ideas like that. Installations where the lighting, imagery and sound all respond to your position in the space for example. The moment you get close to $thing a new riff is dropped in on the next beat, something else when you're no longer close. So many ways to go if you have the budget & space (and audience - I'm vain for that amount of work) to control it all.

...and now we're talking about something much more differenter than an album recorded & mixed to be heard in 3D with some brand name equipment.

squeaky-clean3 tahun yang lalu

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.

harry83 tahun yang lalu

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"

coldtea3 tahun yang lalu

>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).

squeaky-clean3 tahun yang lalu

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.

harry83 tahun yang lalu

>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.

Angostura3 tahun yang lalu

> 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...

squeaky-clean3 tahun yang lalu

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.

twobitshifter3 tahun yang lalu

There’s a difference between stereo equipment and stereo mixes. You can do a lot with stereo equipment in terms of 3D but stereo audio mixes don’t take advantage of that. Stereo mixes don’t get into how sound localization works, the structure of ears, and the head transfer function. Atmos is emulating htf as part of the tech. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_localization

bowsamic3 tahun yang lalu

> 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 simply not true

colanderman3 tahun yang lalu

> VR head tracking to alter the channels based on your head movement to turn your head

I forget where I read recently, I think this is the intention though.

jahsome3 tahun yang lalu

> 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.

harry83 tahun yang lalu

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.

jahsome3 tahun yang lalu

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.

paxys3 tahun yang lalu

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.

toast03 tahun yang lalu

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.

paxys3 tahun yang lalu

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]3 tahun yang lalu

dave843 tahun yang lalu

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.

ruraljuror3 tahun yang lalu

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.

piva003 tahun yang lalu

For music it's pretty much snake oil. Benn Jordan has a good take on it [0].

[0] https://youtu.be/5Dw3aKbw5Wo

TaylorAlexander3 tahun yang lalu

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.

harry83 tahun yang lalu

Wow, knew next to nothing about atmos before today. He does a good job, and he really didn't miss. I like him.

harry83 tahun yang lalu

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?

jcpst3 tahun yang lalu

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.

harry83 tahun yang lalu

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.

cameronh903 tahun yang lalu

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.

harry83 tahun yang lalu

>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.

cameronh903 tahun yang lalu

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.

harry83 tahun yang lalu

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.

harry83 tahun yang lalu

For example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_-2_Q-MAbk

[deleted]3 tahun yang lalu