Comment by pbronez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbronez | Hacker News Reader

Very cool! I enjoy listing to music in spatial audio formats… more immersive than stereo and takes advantage of a setup I put some effort into. Up mixing works ok-ish, but native is better. Sometimes the 3D stuff is a gimmick, and I understand why some people see it as a money grab. I’ve only really gotten into Brian Eno in the last year or so. I think his music is a great candidate for this format. It’s electronic first, and already conceptualized as a soundscape. Look forward to listening to this! Took some digging, but it looks like these are already up on streaming services. The Atmos mixes are listed as stand-alone albums on Tidal. I found 9 Atmos albums there.. big remastering job!

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

https://tidal.com/album/302633697

https://tidal.com/album/302633686

What are people using to listen to these spatial audio mixes? I tried some spatial songs on Amazon, but I was using my regular old Stereo headphones, so the experience was really poor.

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.

> What are people using to listen to these spatial audio mixes

My home theatre setup. I do not have either the space or money to have two separate Atmos listening areas!

How is your home theater set up? :) What's your hardware and/or software that you use?

Oh lordy is that a way to kick off a fight 8)

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)

Apple AirPods (Pro/Max/3rd Gen) all support Dolby Atmos, I used a pair of 3rd gen to sample the Brian Eno recordings.

Do AirPods Pro have multiple drivers in each ear to simulate the environment, or is it all just done with head tracking and downmixed to stereo with some snazzy psychoacoustics?

The snazzy psychoacoustics 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.

I don't see how adding drivers would change anything. All the sound from all the drivers is going to be heard by just one eardrum.

> Sometimes the 3D stuff is a gimmick, and I understand why some people see it as a money grab.

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.

There is a GitHub repo that will let you download the original flac file from the album URL. I believe it’s called tidal - dl.

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