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Comment by tobyhinloopen | Hacker News Reader

This is honestly quite exciting and I’m actually tempted to use get Apple Music to try this. However, it’s not really clear to me how I can play these tracks. Can I use my existing Dolby Atmos setup? If so, what kind of hardware do I need to connect? Can I use a HDMI dongle for my iPad, for example, to connect it to my receiver?

Or is this only an Apple-specific thing that only works on Apple speakers.

I’m afraid I already know the answer and it only works on Apple stuff.

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I would imagine at the very least an Apple TV 4K hooked up to your receiver would work. The Apple TV 4K does support Dolby Atmos and I can't imagine they wouldn't update it to support this. All they say so far is that you need Atmos compatible stuff for it to work.

A friend contacted Apple and got a reply to confirm Atmos would work over Apple TV (if your amp supports it obviously)

For one thing, Apple has a custom Dolby Atmos Implementation on their headphones that ties the accelerometers in the AirPods to detect head position and then adjust sound strength to places where you turn your head. Supposedly when watching movies with Atmos or 7.1 it's incredibly immersive. They just announced their new iMac with 'Atmos' (I want to see how this works) as well however. You probably could connect over HDMI as you state.

Have you tried watching an Atmos/7.1 channels movie with the AirPods that support this?

It sounds like a genuinely good idea for movies, but only for VR, right? How often do you turn your head while watching a regular movie?

All the time. Humans don't stay still. We move our heads regularly, where even small movements help our audiovisual spatial sense.

It's just that our consciousness ignores these little movements and so we think we're largely still.

Yup. It’s like the fact that your eyes heck all over and I believe slightly vibrate in order to sample from slightly different positions to improve image quality.

Yeah, our eyesight is not very good without that saccade motion.

Below some movement threshold you go completely blind in just a few seconds.

One of the standard stare-at-the-dot-machine optometry tests is enough to make my vision start to gray out.

Yeah, your body adjusts to stimulus very quickly to minimize it.

There's Dolby Atmos for Mobile Devices[0]. It does require extra processing, so maybe extra hardware, but it's not unique to Apple.

[0]https://professional.dolby.com/tv/dolby-atmos-for-mobile-dev...

I’m not sure if this is answering any of my questions. Am I missing something?

You’re not...

I would think Apple TV + hdmi should do the trick. There doesn’t seem to be a technical reason this can’t be done seeing as atmos does work on Apple TV, but.... I would rather have my TV off when just having music on.

I meant to say that if you device supports Dolby Atmos then it should work. This spatial audio from Apple is just Dolby Atmos, not some special apple thing (besides being streamed via the Apple Music service).

I've been also wondering the same. I have HomePods in stereo pair and have been trying to figure out how to play surround content on them that is not in the Apple ecosystem (via Apple TV).

(AirPods Pro | AirPods Max) + (Mac | iPad | iPhone) or Apple TV + HDMI. I don't think the Apple Watch + AirPods are supported unfortunately, might be due to battery/performance reasons.

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