A New Look at High Fidelity Music: Dolby ATMOS and the Rise of Spatial Audio – National | globalnews.ca

VAN NUYS, CALIFORNIA – Right off the freeway in the valley is the Sound City complex, a horseshoe-shaped building in the middle of an industrial area. The site once featured the famous Sound City recording studios, where everyone from Fleetwood Mac to Nirvana and Johnny Cash made some of the world’s most famous records. There’s another studio across the parking lot, but it’s dedicated to something entirely different.

I’m here at the invitation of Will Kennedy and Mike Wallace, a couple of audio alchemists whose current job is to turn stereo mixes into something bigger and better. Why have only two channels of audio when you can have 13?

The main room of the studio is covered with rugs on the floor and walls. A small console sits near the middle, surrounded by a tall metal structure that holds four speakers at the top, pointing down at the floor. The console, which consists of little more than a keyboard and some monitors, is completely surrounded by more speakers. Everything is operated from a wild computer interface. This is where Will and Matt work on Dolby ATMOS and spatial audio versions of songs.

“Listen to this,” says Will, poking at the keyboard. “We completely destroyed the Love Shack by B52 and rebuilt it in the ATMOS mix. I know you’ve heard it a million times, but just listen.

The song begins – and it sounds nothing like I expected. Fred Schneider’s lead vocal comes from somewhere in the center. Cindy Wilson and Kate Pearson’s close harmonies are clean and slightly to the left. There’s a definition of baseline that I’ve never looked into before. A guitar line buried in the stereo mix suddenly appears and adds melodic heft to the midrange. And it turns out that the party sound that we hear at various places in the song actually runs through the entire song. With sound coming from all angles, I felt completely immersed in the music. It was… wild.

“It’s something, huh?” Mike is smiling. “Try it now.” He holds an ATMOS version of Faith No More epicA song Mike knows very well as he produced the original for the band in 1989.

The guitar attack is superb, eclipsed only by the bassline, which reveals itself to be more complex and heavy than a standard stereo mix. Voices come from all directions. It’s like I’m in the studio and there’s an arrangement around me. I am immersed in music from all directions.

Will and Matt tell me about more of their work. A 20 year old Jason Mraz song. An impossibly tight group playing modern big-band music. A track with layers and layers of guitar and vocals, the metal band completely envelops the listener in waves of glorious noise. When the last chord ends, I can only sit in awe. I have become a believer.

Before today, I was very apprehensive about this new technology. Why try to improve on songs that are already classics? Wouldn’t it be like trying to make the Mona Lisa more high-resolution? Aren’t you messing with the artists original vision? Are you setting new standards for this music while we’ve been fine with what we’ve been doing for so many years? And who else can buy a home audio system with 13 speakers, all specially arranged and driven by amps that require their own modular reactor?

Cynics will point to the failure of the quadraphonic sound of the early 1970s. Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio didn’t work either. Yes, there are some great classic albums in 5.1, 6.1, 7.1 and beyond available in box sets that sound great on home theaters, but they’re for the obsessed and the audiophiles. How does anyone think this latest attempt to bring extra high fidelity to the masses is going to work? (Sony also has something called 360 Reality Audio that purports to have different features. I’m told Sony is struggling to get it adopted by the industry.)

Will is patient with me. “If you look at the size of these files, they’re huge. That B-52’s file is over two gigabytes. Compare that to about 70 megabytes for the original .wav of the song and maybe eight megabytes for the mp3 version.” Do this. This is because there is a lot of information in this file, including metadata, that will allow the file to be ‘folded down’ to both a 5.1 mix and a stereo mix. In fact, that’s exactly what we’re going to do That’s a unique listening experience on headphones. Any headphone though – like anything, the better the hardware, the better the software – the music – will sound.

It turns out that headphones are the main target of those promoting new technology. In fact, you may already be experiencing spatial audio if you have Apple Music or have downloaded specially encoded songs from iTunes. Instead of “Oh, that sound is coming from the left and those sounds are coming from the right”, the spatial audio tracks suck you in a little deeper. I still haven’t found a recording that brings the sound forward so it sounds like it’s coming from the front (listening with headphones can often give you an indication that a lot of music is coming from the back), but it sure is. Definitely an improvement.

Another advantage? ATMOS demands very little compression on standard finish files. The amount of dynamic range preserved in the recording is insane. Casualties like Red Hot Chili Peppers as opposed to “loud wars” the counter And saint anger From Metallica – two albums I don’t find listenable because they’re compressed to the point of distortion – these ATMOS breathe to the point where you can hear the space between notes. It’s completely three-dimensional, just like when you watch a live concert. The music seems to be coming from everywhere at once.

Looking through a folder full of ongoing mixes, I see some pretty big names, including a couple whose albums haven’t been released and are in the process of being ATMOS-ized. They were definitely off-limits to me.

Will ATMOS and Spatial Audio Become the New Standard? Maybe, especially because so many people consume music through headphones. Will they notice after two decades of listening to terrible MP3-quality audio? Would they even care?

Skeptics will say that this is simply an attempt to inspire us to buy more audio gear. Yes, it is, but we haven’t had a mainstream revolution in audio fidelity since the compact disc. Others point out that those interested in these new blends are motivated by profit. of course they are! that’s how it works. And unless I’m mistaken, creating new mixes like this also means you’re creating new master recordings, thereby resetting the countdown clock on copyright back to zero. That is, these songs will remain out of the public domain for a long time.

And there are more applications beyond music. We are entering the era of the Metaverse. Fully immersive 3D sound is about to be a big deal. Maybe, just maybe, this is the new technology we’ve been waiting for.

On the drive back to Hollywood, I couldn’t get the B-52 mix out of my head. It left me with such a good feeling that the bumps and grinds on the 405 didn’t even occur to me.

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allen cross Q107 is the broadcaster of 102.1 The Edge and is a commentator for Global News.

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