Are you saying that Atmos and Spatial Audio are snake oil, no different than ordinary stereo headphones? If so, seems like Eno would be very low on the list of offenders--though I don't buy it.
That's a great video. If I recall from watching it when the video came out - Atmos is much more of a marketing thing. Converting old stereo tracks to Atmos is pure snake oil, and from a technical perspective even when you know what you are doing it's hard to get an Atmos stream connected to an Atmos player connected to Atmos speakers so you can easily end up with the system falling back to stereo. Even when you get it working, the technical benefits are questionable and again you have the issue that most music in existence was authored for stereo, and trying to modify that audio to produce some kind of effect on Atmos is going to be arbitrarily messing with a musician's intent and probably produce a worse result.
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.
I'm saying that if you want to make 3D soundscapes, we've had that tech for many decades. Headphones work for this. But I'll continue and say headphones /will/ also be superior for that purpose to anything using speakers.
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?
I have an idea. Let’s describe binaural recording, but then not mention it by name. Let’s also say that all of the specialists and engineers that designed atmos didn’t really create anything different and weren’t aware they could just make binaural recordings.
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.
Is that what it is called? Binaural? Like bi="2" and aural="relating to the ear or the sense of hearing." First I've heard the term is today, I guess it makes sense as it will only work with 2 ears, just like stereo. But yeah check out the power of my ignorance - everyone understands exactly what I'm talking about and nobody is gate-keeping with jargon. Cool huh? Not by design but that worked well.
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.
The problem with those head recordings is that they will only work if you're wearing headphones (well, arguably, they are specific to your head and ear shape, but I'm not aware of any spatial audio system taking that into account or if it would make any practical difference...). The beauty of Atmos is that it can be rendered properly whether you're listening on headphones, your TV or in a theatre with 100+ speakers.
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.
>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.
What I meant was that in reality, few musicians are going to release dummy head / binaural content that is mastered such that it only sounds correct if you're listening on headphones. That is: theoretical custom mix for headphones >= Dolby Atmos > traditional compromise stereo mix. However ~all content released is in the latter category. Pretty much all music released is designed to be listened to on the car radio, so all the details are compressed out. In that context, a headphone-specific mix seems to be asking too much.
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.
