Apple Music will now pay 10% higher royalties to artists for Spatial Audio music
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
The illusion was perfect. It was weird and awesome, and I love it.
So the branding is a little confusing — Spatial Audio is a technology that sits between your ears and the encoded mix, as well as a marketing label to differentiate Atmos mixes from stereo mixes in the store.
It sounded gimmicky to me until I experienced it. Now I get why Apple (and others!) are pushing it.
Talking to some musician friends about it and they also do not like the experience, from either side: not as a listener nor as a musician.
It's a cool gimmick for some art projects, but for general listening it has no improvements over stereo while making the process of mixing much more complicated.
I often watch movies with AirPods Max in the living room. Multiple times I've had to take off the headphones to make sure I'm not accidentally blasting whatever I'm watching through the home theater setup instead.
With "normal" headphones the sound follows your head, so if you glance to the side to see where your snacks are, the voice turns. With spatial audio the voice still sounds like it's coming from where the TV is. (Or iPad or iPhone)
Also, think of it as not an intentionally developed feature for the current gen of devices, but rather the "next gen" of AR glasses and such. I don't think apple went out of their way to build it as a selling feature today, but as a consequence of building it for their AR vision of the future, they can release and test it today.
What the article is referring to is more like music recorded in Atmos (not actually Atmos??, but same idea). You can hear where instruments or vocals, or whatever are coming from in relation to each other (or technically whatever position they want you to hear them at).
As for the consumer experience, I feel like Benn Jordan's video from earlier last year does a good job of explaining the situation and its current limitations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Dw3aKbw5Wo
And my guess is the apple vision pro team and corporate leadership are asking for it, because they're still trying to figure out why it exists.
I also suspect this is a big part of the reason they developed Spatial Audio in the first place.
Otherwise it's just early 2000s loudness wars all over again.
This reminds me of how when stereo first came out artists (including the Beatles) didn’t take it seriously. They would spend most of their time getting the mono mix right and the the stereo mix was thrown together and would often do strange things like having the lead vocals on one side.
Does anyone know of artists that have really taken the time to ensure their music is benefitting from Dolby Atmos?
Do the same engineers hate doing compressed crap where the waveform looks like this: ========== too?
At least all of the Atmos mixes I've listened have some dynamic range in it.
Nice Atmos tracks by other artists imho:
- Jaguar by Victoria Monét
- get well soon by Ariana Grande
- Heroes (feat. Mindy Jones) by Moby, Album "Reprise"
In general, the situation with Spatial Audio mixes is confusing, and it is really annoying for back catalog tracks where instead of the established (sometimes iconic) stereo version you silently get an Atmos version that the label commissioned without input from the original artist/producer/engineer.
Listening to The Court right now and the soundscape is really well done.
But after about a month I turned it off. All the stereo mixes sound better. It some cases, a lot better. I don't want music swirling around my head every time I look left or right.
Sorry Apple. Sorry artists. Stereo has endured this long for a reason. We have two ears.
Apple Music doesn't let you easily choose spatial vs non-spatial from the Now Playing screen. They have a single on/off toggle for everything. So it's much easier to simply have Spatial Audio turned off for everything.
Because on the one hand, listening to spatial audio on headphones is fantastic -- I will absolutely never go back to regular stereo-through-headphones playback that sounds like comes from inside your head. Spatial audio feels like it comes from outside your head, and totally eliminates the "headphones fatigue" the inside-your-head sensation creates. And you can literally hear more detail in the music because there's more separation in the instruments.
But on the other hand, it's not super clear that spatial audio recordings are all that necessary for music, because the "Spatialize Stereo" setting works pretty well on its own. You don't need Dolby mastering -- my iPhone spatializes any stereo track already, doing whatever magic processing it does based on the relative volumes and delays of the same frequencies on the L/R channels.
I've tried listening to the same tracks using Apple Music's spatial masters, and in Spotify with the spatialized stereo version. The Apple Music versions feel maybe twice as "wide" with more separation between some instruments (and sounds are usually placed a bit differently). But on the other hand, it's not clear to me that that's actually a good thing. Because when I'm watching movies with my AirPods, I do want sounds from the left to feel like they're coming all the way from the left. But when I'm listening to music on the train or on a bus, too much spatial separation feels like it might be more distracting than desired. Spatialized stereo feels good enough to me -- I don't really see a huge benefit in remastering music in surround say, the way there has been a huge benefit in remastering movie audio from previous decades in surround.
But I guess we'll see. Especially with new speakers like the Sonos Era 300 [1] that are actually built to project spatial audio into a room -- so it's not just something for headphones anymore.
It may be the producer's deliberate choice to have the voice here, the guitar there, etc, and automatic "spatializers" may moot that choice. But of course so may playing it via a single-channel Bluetooth speaker. It's up to the listener to provide the experience they like best, but I question the need to have Apple pushing this particular type of mix so hard.
Not in any of my experience or knowledge. Literally every set of headphones makes it sound like both mono and stereo audio are coming from inside your head, unless the actual mastering is meant to provide an "outside your head" experience.
Originally, the "outside your head" experience only came from binaural recordings, where two microphones were placed inside dummy ears on a dummy head. That led to the famous "virtual barbershop" audio track and similar. The "outside" effect comes from a combination of relative delays* and the head-related transfer function (HRTF) [1] -- how the shape of your head and ear affects the sound waves.
Regular stereo mastering never uses any of these binaural effects, so it always sounds "inside", or "between the ears".
Spatializing stereo, on the other hand, is Apple's (quite successful) attempt to create relative delays and the HRTF. It has nothing to do with the quality or specifications of your headphones, and rather everything to do with the audio signal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function
*To be precisely accurate, I believe the delays are actually included as part of the overall HRTF.
They don't, not on its size. I'm not sure what mechanism by which you think they would?
> But Apple is far from the first to do this kind of precision stereo manipulation.
Certainly not -- I never suggested they were.
So I think the technology is quite cool and I will use it again. It won't be very often though, because all my regular listening areas/devices are stereo.
On apple pods atmos sounds like an allpass filtered mush, with weird coloration and all transients and bass done in.
It is especially apparent when switching between stereo and atmos on the same track - why would I want it? Am I missing something?
At least apple didn't catch the MQA disease (for now. thanks?)
I tried using Home Sharing yesterday. The iPhone app simply showed a spinner that eventually disappeared. No error messages, nothing. I’m logged in on the same account, same wifi, etc. I tried logging out and in, force quitting, turning off and on home sharing, nothing worked. Annoyed me so much I even lost the joy of listening to the song.
I don’t give a shit about spatial audio. I want basic functionality we had 20 years ago.