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.
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.
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
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.
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.