Dolby Atmos and Apple’s rewritten audio stack | Hacker News Reader

Dolby Atmos and Apple’s rewritten audio stack

scobleizer.blog

26 pointsTiredOfLife65 comments

This sounds really exciting until I start seeing stuff like this:

> Yes, if you aren’t on Apple Music you are an idiot.

I tried Apple Music a couple years ago and switched back to Spotify after my free trial because I strongly preferred Spotify's UX over Apple Music, which mattered to me because Spotify is easily my most-used app. I'm not gonna sit there and chide anyone for preferring Apple Music over Spotify, but I can't really take a gatekeeping opinion like that or it's author very seriously either.

Couple years ago I was trialing the big music streaming services. I cancelled Apple music after couple days, despite being 3 month trilal, because the ui was unusable in Windows. Graphic glitches, freezes, memory leaks.

I definitely don't think anyone should be criticised for choosing Spotify.

Especially if they are using cheaper headphones which don't benefit from the lossless audio on Apple Music.

on android, apple music:

* crashes frequently

* freezes

* fails to start playing songs

* fails to cache artwork

Their competitors, Spotify and deezer, always work.

> I still remember walking into Tower Records back in 1979 when CDs were just coming out and they only had a few dozen to choose from

What? Who is this guy, and how did facts not get checked?

CDs didn't exist till a few years later:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc

Maybe that's a typo? 1989 sounds more accurate in the context.

Agreed, but by 1989 there were countless thousands of CDs.

"This guy" is Rob Scoble, whose reputation as a tech blogger is spotty at best. I haven't read him in years (on account of said reputation), but he was widely regarded as a hack back when he was more influential.

I believe this is his claim to fame

https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4333656/larry-page-teases...

Just a guy who's... very enthusiastic about his tech products

This article is high on audiophile waffle and low on substance!

Atmos-for-the-home is a fad that's being heavily pushed by music studios. It makes total sense for movies (the concept of an object-based audio standard which gets rendered to however many speakers are in your theatre saves a huge amount of hassle on mixing and QCing dozens of mixes in LCR, 5.1, 7.1... 22.2, etc) but for most people who aren't sitting in a purpose-built listening room it has very limited utility.

If you've got a single "Atmos" speaker in the corner of your kitchen, should it really attempt to spatialise the audio coming from your shelf? Even if you put speakers all around your living room, unless there's a defined "centre" position it doesn't make much sense.

Headphones are even worse. Do you ignore head-tracking information (in which case the binaural downmix will almost certainly be worse than a properly rendered stereo mix - just switch from stereo to Atmos on Apple Music on headphones for an example - the stereo versions almost all sound better) or use head-tracking information in real time (in which case, turn a corner while you're walking and suddenly the lead vocal is coming from the left)?

Atmos/object-based mixing is a very sensible evolution in pro audio, for sure. But Atmos on an iPhone speaker is a weird bit of marketing that doesn't really make much sense...

I suspect the "Atmos" name is being used beyond the context of object-based (i.e. video game like) audio. At least on my Android phone, it just sounds like a bit of EQ and some cross-stereo mixing.

Windows Media Player had a similar effect for playback, then branded as SRS Wow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Retrieval_System

I can hear the phase distortion induced by the processing from the Atmos stuff in the spatial audio, its.. objectively awful. (it sounds like high frequency swirling in the hiss in the track, or anything that could be in the range of hiss)

I'm pretty sure I could measure it with the right tools, I'm not audiophile, and I don't believe much in the woo and snakeoil heavy claims, but for me, I agree that the sound is worse than a good stereo mix.

One thing I don't really understand about Atmos is, if you're listening through a stereo source (e.g headphones) everything has to be downmixed to two physical speakers. You can do fancy phase change psychoacoustics stuff but it's still coming out of those two speakers. You're taking a model with effectively unlimited sound sources and rendering it down to a stereo signal like any other non-Atmos source.

So is there really a difference compared to a differently-mixed stereo track (other than sucking down a ton of Apple/Dolby marketing hype)? if an artist really wanted their music to sound 3D over stereo speakers, they can already do that during the rendering process.

It is obvious advantage if you have nice surround spraker system that is not made for movies only but is good enough for listening of music. I tried this with Apple TV and 7.1 system and it works quite nice. For headphones it makes sense if they react to your head movement like some airpods do. When I first watched movie with iphone and airpods pro in spatial audio mode, I had to remove headphones to check that the sound was really comming from them and not from phone. It is actually quite good. I haven't listened to music like that yet.

> I had to remove headphones to check that the sound was really comming from them and not from phone

I had this experience as well, I kinda liked it but suspect it will be divisive. Also if you switch positions it takes about 5-10 seconds for the system to recenter itself; until then it thinks you're looking left/right.

On the technical perspective no. 3D stereo was always possible, but what Atmos offers is the ability to deliver the 3D experience to any audio player. A mix for headphones won’t sound right on a home cinema, or in a car and having the actual vector data allows for it to sound right everywhere.

> This article is high on audiophile waffle and low on substance!

This is standard Scoble: he’s a professional promoter who’s made a living sounding excited about how The! World! Is! Changing! Even before the sexual harassment news a couple years back he’d lost a lot of following because there are primary sources you could go directly to instead.

I wondered the same thing about the AirPods Pro Atmos head tracking (which just came out for music, in iOS 15 I think). If you turn your head and leave it there, after about 5 seconds the soundstage will start to move toward your new orientation, and fully recenters in about 10 seconds.

Of course a cynical view is a lot of these new Atmos mixes will be shoddily made semi automated creations, a modern version of the faux stereo of the 1960s where they just delayed one channel slightly.

Android has had Dolby atmos for years as has tidal. If you’re an apple fanboi just start the article with that disclaimer so people can read the article through the appropriate lens. Almost all of the modern high-end “audiophile” gear runs Linux under the covers. This isn’t revolutionary, it’s apple joining the atmos party.

> Almost all of the modern high-end “audiophile” gear runs Linux under the covers.

Citation needed. A lot of high end audio stuff uses vacuum tubes, and I’m pretty sure they aren’t running Linux.

Ok, pick a vendor and any piece of hardware that has an electronic controller?

Mark Levinson? Linux:

https://the-ear.net/news/mark-levinson-no-519-streamer-cd-da...

Bang and olufsen?

https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/466449/linux-c-plus-plus-embe...

It’s not like most of these companies put “running embedded Linux!!” on the marketing pages but if you get your hands on one you’ll figure it out pretty quickly.

Source: buddy is an audiophile and a Unix nerd and has torn most of his gear apart at some point.

Can you even play Dolby Atmos on Linux? It's not supported by Tidal on Windows, and I don't think any other streaming platform with native Windows app offers it.

Additionally, Linux is more or less just an implementation detail mostly only relevant to OEMs, everyone else uses abstractions provided by Google, so even if Atmos is supported there, it doesn't mean much for the general Linux.

I guess that depends on how you define Linux. It works on android, shieldtv, firetv, and other googletv enabled televisions.

That’s not really the point I was making anyway. My point was his insinuation that Apple has the market cornered on high end audio is absurd. The audiophile devices themselves are built on Linux not OSX. And android has had Dolby for years, so it isn’t something brand new as he’s implying, it’s just new to Apple.

And yes, it is supported on windows and has been for some time, you need to use the tidal app from the windows App Store:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TIdaL/comments/gnkaaq/dolby_atmos_o...

You can also say it works on BSD (macOS), but that has no relation to other BSD flavors.

Tidal doesn't seem to support it on Windows:

> Listening to Dolby Atmos Music on TIDAL using headphones only works when connected to Dolby Atmos enabled Android smartphones and tablets today.

From: https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004255778-Dol...

> You can also say it works on BSD (macOS), but that has no relation to other BSD flavors.

I still don’t get your point. I never said tidal on Linux supported atmos. I said audiophile devices are almost universally running embedded Linux and implied they have had a superior audio stack for a long time, which they have. Additionally I said android direct has had Atmos support for years.

> Tidal doesn't seem to support it on Windows:

I literally just tested it. You’re taking that quote completely out of context, it has nothing to do with windows and doesn’t mention windows. The question you failed to include was:

> Does Dolby Atmos work over headphones (e.g. headphones connected to your TV)?

>No, you cannot get the Dolby Atmos experience on TIDAL using headphones connected to living room devices.

That’s specifically referencing hooking up Bluetooth headphones to your TV. Not windows.

I thought Linux was mentioned due to Android. Regardless, what gear exactly is using Linux under the hood? AFAIK most (if not all) audio production is done on Mac/Windows, so I'm not sure how much more audiophile you can get than people actually making the music.

> You’re taking that quote completely out of context, it has nothing to do with windows and doesn’t mention windows.

This is the only article on Tidal page about Dolby Atmos, and I'd assume they would mention if they supported it? There is also no mention of supposed Windows support on Dolby website.

> That’s specifically referencing hooking up Bluetooth headphones to your TV. Not windows.

e.g. = for example; I assume they won't mention all possible scenarios.

Since we are talking about personal experience: I was trying to get Dolby Atmos to work on Tidal/Windows a few days ago via HDMI, without success, but playing movies with Atmos works. I haven't tried with headphones, but since there is no official confirmation, it's fair to assume it doesn't work.

Why does this guy seem to think live concerts and musicals are the yard stick of sound quality?

Standing front-row at a stadium concert, a festival tent or a local live-house isn't exactly great sounding audio. It's an experience, yes, but there's a reason people tend to buy studio recordings over live recordings.

Reading the rest of this blog post makes me want to cancel my apple music subscription.

Why did you bring up recordings of live events? The comparison is with actually being there live in person.

Last concert I was at (Red Hot Chili Peppers) live in person the audio was so bad I could not even make out the words. It was literally just noise with a drumbeat.

Live is often worse than a sound-board recording of the same show. Too many concerts have audio “engineers” who think the job consists of cranking a knob up to 11 – I basically stopped going to big shows in San Diego when I realized that the popular venues were totally okay with letting the speakers distort horribly all night. Unless the band had better standards it just wasn’t worth it.

How else would you argue that people in general go to concerts for the experience and not the sound?

By saying that when you remove the experience people aren’t really that interested.

> there's a reason people tend to buy studio recordings over live recordings.

There are live recordings and there are proper live recordings. The second one is very hard to do, and very hard to find.

Blind Guardian, Metallica, Manowar, Iron Maiden, Iced Earth and Pink Martini tend to do this right IME. Classical performances are another category, but the environment is utterly different in these.

Ironically, the front row at a concert is usually one of the WORST places you can be for good sound. The main PA hangs don't cover the first few rows, so you're stuck with whatever front fill they threw in as an afterthought for coverage, and (if they're not flying the subs) you get pounded with low-end.

Yeah, I love live concerts, but even hanging out by the sound board (which is usually the spot that sounds best) you usually get something that other than the volume sounds about as good as you'd get with some cheap headphones.

Unamplified live performances in a concert hall with good acoustics can sound amazing, but as soon as there's a PA involved they nearly always go for volume over quality.

Atmos for music is - I hate to say it - just a fad, at least for now. Nothing touches a good stereo recording. Not the latest Atmos mixes from The Weekend, not a remaster from Rush or REM, and certainly not the weird Atmos versions of old Mono recordings from Miles Davis.

Now, XBox / PS5 gaming is a different story. Playing Assassin's Creed, or some of the other modern Atmos games, is pretty stunning.

I'm fortunate enough to have a purpose built Dolby Atmos theater. I've spent hours calibrating it, listening to MQA Audio via Tidal, Atmos over Apple Music, and top-quality Blu-Ray Audio (The Wall, etc). There's really no question that good 'ol Stereo is still king.

Purely for science, I've spent hours and hours testing - and seeing which cognac and whiskey's best match which songs. :)

> This is why I am trying to get the VR/AR industry to care about the changes going on with Apple Music and its investments in 3D music.

Really? Spatial audio has been solved here for years, the last thing we need is Another Competing Standard that isn't open and relies on specialized hardware.

> If you have an Android phone, good for you. It doesn’t sound as good as Apple’s ecosystem.

If you have an Android phone, there's a pretty good chance it has an internal DAC, which puts it's objective audio quality above the latest iPhone. Sorry to all the psychoacoustic nerds out there, but AAC is still not lossless. And lines like...

> Yes, if you aren’t on Apple Music you are an idiot.

...don't do a whole lot to reinforce their argument.

If you're going to be objective, be objective. If you're writing an opinion piece, be opinionated. Crossing the two leads to head-scratching rhetoric like this, which makes me wonder if it's written by a fanboy or someone who genuinely does not understand hi-fi and spatial audio. I'd like to believe it's neither, but little in the article substantiates that.

You seem to be unaware that with a flip of a toggle Apple Music serves lossless to you.

Great lot of good that does you when you're listening with Airpods or anything wireless. You're locked in 320kbps AAC no matter what, and everything goes through Apple's psychoacoustic treatment. Even if you are one of the ~5% of Mac users who's got their DAC plugged in to their high-impedance headphones, you could be getting the same experience or better on pretty much all of your other (non-DirectSound) hardware.

So few things wrong here:

a) Bit rate has improved from 256kbps to 320kbps.

b) It's a lossless path all the way to your Mac which encodes and streams AAC to your Airpod. There is no psychoacoustic treatment since obviously you use Airpods for tasks other than music which it would interfere with.

For me personally I have noticed a significant improvement with using lossless audio with my Airpods.

I agree with this analysis. A lot of this article is just typical audiophile wank. I actually own rather high end gear, not because I "am an audiophile", but because I enjoy objective measurements. I bought objectively well measuring equipment, and the equipment is beyond the most golden of ears.

The only thing Apple has done right, audio-wise, in years is their iTunes Plus AAC encoder (one of two encoders that do to AAC what LAME does to MP3), and their cheap USB-C dongle (of the <$50 audio dongles, it beats the rest, although a bit quiet on lower efficiency headphones; ironically, their Lightning one, same tiny circuit board, isn't as good). Anything with speakers is just overpriced mediocre garbage.

Apple has lossless now, but most of their library isn't in lossless, and they aren't even the largest lossless music streamer. The experience of their app has an awful UX on all platforms (including iOS/OSX tbh), but to be absolutely fair, the "winner" in this space is Spotify, and they aren't winning any awards either (and they don't have lossless yet).

Anyone who is into music just owns their favorite music in lossless, in a format they dictate, in software they dictate.

> Anyone who is into music just owns their favorite music in lossless, in a format they dictate, in software they dictate.

This is me. I don't use Spotify nor Apple Music or any of those subscription services. I use self-hosted Subsonic for streaming and buy all new stuff on Bandcamp or HDtracks.

> Anyone who is into music just owns their favorite music in lossless

Apple has access to the 24-bit masters [1] so when they are encoding they have access to far more dynamic range than if you are ripping from a CD in lossless format.

For me being into music I want the best quality so will be sticking with Apple.

[1] https://www.apple.com/apple-music/apple-digital-masters/docs...

I understand spatial audio is the new thing, but what I want are consumer audio products that care about the time domain. Everything I’ve heard outside of the pro audio scene (studio and live) has “squishy” transients and lots of time smearing.

Between this, latency issues and the frankly soft dynamic range of most consumer hardware, I'd really like to see someone deliver a truly "professional" audio stack, without compromise. Pipewire gets so close to solving this issue it makes me want to pull my hair out, perhaps Apple will address this with their upcoming chips(?)

Isn’t Apple’s audio stack used professionally? What exactly are you wishing for? Why would the chip make any difference to a software audio stack?

CoreAudio is fine, but I've still got gripes with it. Most importantly, it's not as modular as PipeWire is, and it doesn't really expose a whole lot of functionality via the system API. It's coasted along by just being "better than Windows" for quite some time now, but I'd like to see Apple push it into the next decade with something more substantial than just spatial audio.

I’ve been a die hard Spotify fan, and since I need a lot of the Apple ecosystem, still pay for the Apple + subscription, so I get Apple Music for free.

I just pulled up Hamilton on Atmos on my Sonos ARC, subwoofer, and two cheap IKEA speakers for rears.

It’s stunning. It’s also quite good coming out of my AirPods Pro, despite how crappy those speakers are.

A friend of mine recently opined that Spatial Audio couldn’t be all that, because after all “what does apple know about audio?”

Its good to see Apple back in the game since the iPod.

Apple's doing very impressing stuff with audio, and it's interesting to see just how strategically strong Apple is (when you realize the link between Dolby and Spacial Audio, and the future Apple VR/AR headsets). But I still switched back to Spotify a week ago because there's appwide back and forward buttons, you can subscribe to song stations and they're refreshed often, better music discovery (there's no daily mixes or discover weekly on Apple Music), Spotify Connect, much better playlist management (not forced-alphabetical sorting, visible song recommendations within playlists as opposed to an opaque "infinity play" thing.

I love music and I've been using Spotify since ~2010, then Apple Music since 2018, and I'd almost stopped listening to music after a few years using Apple Music exclusively. I prefer playing back on my Mac, and controlling playback on my phone. The worse music discovery and orders-of-magnitude lesser amount of shared public playlists on Apple Music (on Spotify, your playlists are public by default, on Apple Music they're private; I liked adding total strangers' playlists and discovering music that way) made it so that on Apple Music, I oftened just kept listening to the same music over and over again, until eventually I played music only an hour or two per month. After switching back to Spotify I'm finally enjoying music again, and listening every day. All because Apple couldn't get the basics right.

Corporate strategy that's well coordinated from the top is an immensely powerful thing, but Apple's execution has been extremely lacking in some areas. They don't have the best Email, don't have the best productivity suite except for Keynote, don't have the best books app/store (can't sync book & audiobook like on Kindle), don't have the best Maps, don't have the best movie streaming service (despite Foundation & Stewart's great show), don't have the best browser, all their webapps are very poor; and on and on. That's all a culture issue.

Spotify doesn't have lyrics, or Hi-Fi (yet, and will likely have to make it a paid upgrade) because Spotify's literally can't afford lyrics and other stuff right now. Yet they still execute better, on the basic user experience, than Apple. Strategy is vastly overrated when you don't execute well (anymore).

> (there's no daily mixes or discover weekly on Apple Music)

There's "new music" station which is updated weekly based on listening history. Also I get additional recommended stations in genres I tend to listen to. Is it close to discover on Spotify?

New Music isn’t like Discover Weekly from what I understand, it’s more like Release Radar, just music that’s just come out that AM thinks you’ll like. And recommended stations: you can’t add to your library or subscribe to, unlike Spotify; for Spotify they’re just normal, regularly updated playlists you can “Like”, so you can revisit them every now and then and discover new stuff.

BTW, I think Apple Music’s playlists are way better than Spotify’s, so I expect to switch back once they fix the basic experience. I tried to stick to Apple Music for years, and rationalised it with all the features Apple has Spotify doesn’t, but the amount of music I listened to on Apple Music vs. on Spotify just doesn’t lie (obviously an anecdote, and Monterey’s Airplay to Mac will likely fix the bulk of my issues with it)

Not sure what you mean here.

a) Discover Weekly according to Spotify is identical to New Music. Every week you get a new playlist that has new releases that they think you will like based on previous listening history.

b) You can add recommended stations to your library and they do appear as regular playlists that you can like, revisit them every now and again and discover new stuff.

I have no idea what the DW algorithm actually does, but I almost never get new releases. It quite often doesn't even pick the most recent popular song from a given artist.

> Every week you get a new playlist that has new releases that they think you will like based on previous listening history

That's not what Discover Weekly is. Discover weekly contains a diverse selection of music from any time period which you might like and refreshes itself with a new set of songs every week, which would generally be higher quality and more interesting since there is far more material to choose from.

Spotify also has "Release radar" for personalized new music suggestions.

I can't add stations to my Apple Music library; when I click on the three dots it just gives me a Share menu that lets me copy the link. And you can't see the songs in that station with a playlist-like view, just play them.

Maybe it wasn’t meant to be taken literally, but it’s difficult to believe he listened to tens of thousands of tracks, which would amount to almost 10 weeks of non-stop music on the conservative end of an estimate.

Do Macs support Atmos over HDMI to a home theatre?

I’m not sure about Macs, but AppleTV definitely does.

No. The only Atmos support is via integrated speakers on MacBooks.

There's a guide here from Dolby as to which Macs support Atmos:

https://developer.dolby.com/platforms/apple/macos/os-support...

As others have pointed out it's not support over HDMI.

technical evangelist = used car salesman

No amount of audio improvements are going to make me use a platform that scans my nudes and progressively invades my privacy.

Apple Music is accessible on Android

Google also scans your nudes.

In fact every cloud provider that you upload your images to does.

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