Brian Eno albums available in Dolby Atmos and Spatial
udiscovermusic.com
udiscovermusic.com
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.
Maybe. Good idea nonetheless.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same with music.
Not to mention the resurgence of vinyl (not that I have any interest in that personally).
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?
And I’d be interested in a link to their Bandcamp if possible!
Fun fact, Deezer started off as a piracy website that grew big enough to turn legitimate when sued :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
It's not a technical thing, but purely a business decision.
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).
Yes, yes.
You can also connect a multichannel DAC to any Mac or iOS device.
Oh wait, I have an M1 MBP now with the restored HDMI port...
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
So you could just export atmos to a 5.1 mix, but that is not a copy of atmos tracks.
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.
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.
(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.)
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?
Atmos on my AirPods seems to work just fine, but I guess I'm curious if I'm missing something?
The over-simplification is that Atmos doesn't improve music, and rarely works. And 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.
Now, whether you care about is personal preference. But it's definitely a real thing.
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.
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.
I heard a rumor that there is in fact a Parsons-mastered surround mix in existence.
Although I'm not sure I agree with you. Other human beings on planet earth are capable of remixing an album.
Meanwhile, I enjoy Steven Wilson's surround mix of XTC's Nonsuch (except the first track, in which the vocals are oddly messed up).
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.
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.)
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+.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui9TPLTV-Rk [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeD0g5xXo7E
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
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.
My home theatre setup. I do not have either the space or money to have two separate Atmos listening areas!
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)
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.
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.
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.
http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/onland-txt.html
this smells like yet another MBA-style publishing effort unfortunately..
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)."
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.
...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.
I forget where I read recently, I think this is the intention though.
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
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.
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"
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).
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.
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...
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).
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.
Pretty bold claim from someone who "do[es]n't know, or indeed care" about the technology involved.
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. ;)
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!"
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.
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.
This is simply not true
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.
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.