Apple Music and Mercedes-Benz bring immersive Spatial Audio to drivers
apple.com
apple.com
But in a car you are guaranteed to be facing forwards all the time. The "rear" speakers will always be behind you.
When I'm driving, I want my ears to alert me to spatial happenings where I can't see them. I force the audio to the front speakers only, specifically to prevent it from sounding too "real". I also hate it when the music has sirens in it.
So, this is spiffy, but I hope there's a way to turn it off.
Secondly, people commute. A lot. They also like music. Good sound systems have been very important for people for decades now as a result.
Last but not least: I prefer to not paying for stuff that I don't need, but car hifi is one of the (many) "features" you cannot opt-out easily.
They know noise cancelling though, at least knew better than most few years ago. It seems other players have caught up on this though
Driving is a privilege, not a right. The consequences are drastic, and the bad behaviors creep.
That said, I'm skeptical that it's designed well because there's a menu for climate control. These things should have physical buttons that blend with the digital UI.
This sounds okay when mixed back down to stereo for headphones; there's a certain airiness that can be pleasing, but that's it.
In an expensive Mercedes, I'd expect proper spatial audio with separate speakers for separate channels and it to sound maybe not quite as bad as in a home theater setting, but nearly.
Unless these masters get significantly better I'll just stick to the stereo mix duplicated on other channels. The one exception to the rule above that I've experienced was some song by Billie Eilish. I didn't enjoy the music, but the mastering was excellent: they took care to actually move the location of sounds around that didn't interfer with the music.
When Sandy Munroe tore down the Tesla Model 3, a remark he made hit hard. That the control electronics in that thing seemed like space age for the car industry.
That's not a compliment to Tesla alone, that's a criticism of the state of the art in the car industry where miniaturization has not kept pace with the leading edge phone generations that Apple spits out every year.
Imagine that, a common platform that Apple could upsell to ALL vehicle manufacturers with custom enterprise apps written by the companies themselves for vehicle electronics.
Note also that CarPlay does not work at all with Siri disabled. This means that if you don’t opt in to a hot mic you can’t use any of it.
2. Siri is activated by user input (holding a button / pressing a button in-car) with a side feature for hot mic (hey siri) that’s disabled by default
3. Maybe there’s car implementation solely driven by Siri? Hondas is touch screen and Mazda is button/knob based (and touch screen but only when idle).
At the least it likely won’t be worse than the multitude of cars that have moved to digital clusters anyway and may freeze themselves.
The claim of Carplay not working without Siri is also incorrect. A quick Google search shows you can disable Siri but will be limited in what you can do https://stereoupgrade.com/how-to-use-carplay-without-siri/ since the goal is hands free use.
Lastly most newer iPhones do on device Siri processing for common commands so it’s not really a privacy issue.
Imagine a vehicle that was just a vehicle and not another platform to upsell shit on until the vendors get fed up with it because that's what you're asking for.
Absolutely 100% in the case of vehicles, less is more. Less intelligence, less nondeterminism and definitely less space age.
Part of this is that a car contains quite a lot of electronics (there are a lot of things to control!), but cars are super cost sensitive. That pretty much means the car industry is barred from using any remotely modern tech, because they need to be buying CPU's and microprocessors that are in the $1 range, not the $100 range.
Obviously, the other half of it is just that the car industry is now very conservative with designs - today a big innovation is something like having an app, whereas back in the 60's, a big innovation would be adding a jet engine or making a flying car.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
But what would you gain from a WhatsApp call? It’s a mono source
It would also be nice for a callers voice and other sounds in the call, like for example music or background sound, to be audibly separated - the fact they aren't separated is part of what makes background sounds on voice calls so annoying compared to say background sounds when talking to someone on the street..
We process speech differently depending on where it comes from, and so someone could be given an “edge” by coming from a specific “spot” while others could be downplayed by being placed in a “lesser spot”.
I know it sounds completely out there, but I got this awareness years ago from a scientific study (what to even look up to find it again I don’t know. Hopefully a fellow HN user knows what I’m talking about and can cite) and I have noticed the effect is actually quite drastic once you know what to look for.
To a lesser extent: Clubhouse brought in spatial audio and it caused more chaos because of the way it was implemented: Some speakers were behind others which made their voices noticeably louder, and because multiple speakers could talk at once and be understood there was less respect for the person who’s turn it was. (Before that if someone talked over it just became an unintelligible clump of sound and moderators would bring things back to the single speaker)
Specifically, if someone thinks they're being talked over and their voice drowned out, they'll normally stop speaking. By making one person's voice sound louder to the other, you determine which person will stop speaking when both start to say something at the same time.
In terms of audio, the speaker locations in the car for a specific model are all fixed and can be known. So it seems like Spotify could probably add it if they had not only all of that speaker data, but also acoustic modeling to see how each speaker's frequency sweep was transmitted and reflected to each passenger's ears. So they'd want to get their hands on an actual car and spend a lot of time making a lot of microphone measurements inside of dummy ears. And then the spatial audio algorithms aren't trivial to write, but that kind of thing has been around for a while now so it's definitely doable.
But as for communicating that sound to the car -- the problem is that there are 31 speakers requiring 31 sound channels, and you certainly can't play that over Bluetooth. So I assume there has to be some custom audio stream format happening here over CarPlay? That's where the vertical integration is going to come into play. I also can't help but wonder if the Mercedes come with a dedicated audio-processing chip to handle it all. Because while a phone's chip is definitely capable enough to calculate 31 streams, I'm not sure if a Lightning port has enough bandwidth to output that uncompressed, and I'm also not sure if it would slow down the phone enough to affect the performance of other apps like Maps. So you'd probably want the phone to just output the compressed 5.1 stream, and have the car do all the fancy spatial audio processing.
In any case, if this works like AirPods, the Spotify stereo audio stream will be "spatialized" so it'll work just fine. It will be inferred stereo spatial rather than 5.1 mastered, but that's still awfully effective. And a group audio call could similarly be spatialized from a stereo stream that merely panned participants left-to-right.
The simple description of how this likely works is:
- the tracks are encoded with Dolby atmos that allows encoding positional data for sources. These don’t match up to channels on an audio system in anyway because it gives them flexibility
- the audio apps simply provide the atmos encoded stream which is pulled into the cars own audio system. The audio app needs no knowledge of the target playback device.
- the cars audio system knows where the speakers are so can then playback sounds on each relative to where the atmos sources are positioned.
- this isn’t done over Bluetooth. In this case the Apple Music app is running natively on the cars MBUC system. If it weren’t native, it would use CarPlay which isn’t using Bluetooth for either its wired or wireless mode.
Edit: If I spent that much on a car I would be furious to turn it on and find that interface.
I couldn't disagree more about the "fake surround filter" though -- I love surround sound on my AirPods Pro, even when "spatialized" from stereo. It simply makes music and movies/TV so much clearer to listen to. Everything becomes more distinct and intelligible.
I understand how people rail against the "purity" of the original stereo mix's "intentions", but the reality is that when you listen to music on speakers, the amount of reflection and absorption in any room is already destroying that "purity". Spatial audio filters aren't "destroying" the audio anymore than speakers in a room already do -- the difference is that they're increasing clarity rather than muddying it all up.
I can't ever imagine going back to listening to flat stereo again, where the sound on headphones feels stuck inside of my skull instead of coming from outside.
Headphone fatigue is a real thing, coming from the fact that our brains aren't meant to process audio without all of the associated spatial cues. (Sound isn't supposed to feel like it's emanating from inside our skulls.) Modern surround filters do an awfully good job at restoring those cues. No more headphone fatigue.
But I almost always detest how these mixes sound on my actual 5.1.2 setup. The surround channels mostly consist of a bit of reverb that adds nothing to the experience in my opinion. In a car where there are physically separate channels, I'm not optimistic for the result.