A new look at high fidelity music: The rise of Dolby ATMOS and Spatial Audio – National | 24CA News

VAN NUYS, CALIFORNIA — Just off the freeway within the Valley is the Sound City Complex, a horseshoe-shaped constructing in the course of an industrial zone. The website as soon as featured the famed Sound City recording studios the place everybody from Fleetwood Mac to Nirvana to Johnny Cash made a number of the world’s well-known information. Across the parking zone is one other studio, however it’s dedicated to one thing solely completely different.

I’m right here on the invitation of Will Kennedy and Mike Wallace, a few audio alchemists whose present job is popping stereo mixes into one thing larger and grander. Why have simply two channels of audio when you’ll be able to have 13?

The principal room of the studio is roofed in carpets on the ground and partitions. A small console sits close to the center, surrounded by a tall metallic construction that holds 4 audio system on the prime pointing down on the ground. The console, which options little greater than a keyboard and a few displays, is completely surrounded by extra audio system. Everything operates from a wild pc interface. This is the place Will and Matt work on Dolby ATMOS and Spatial Audio variations of songs.

“Listen to this,” says Will, poking on the keyboard. “We completely dismantled Love Shack by The B52’s and rebuilt it into an ATMOS mix. I know you’ve heard it a million times, but just listen.”

The tune begins — and it sounds nothing like I anticipated. Fred Schneider’s lead vocal comes from someplace within the centre. The shut harmonies of Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson are clear and barely to the left. The bassline has a definition that I’d by no means observed earlier than. A guitar line, buried within the stereo combine abruptly seems and provides melodic heft to the midrange. And it seems that the occasion sounds that we hear in varied locations within the tune truly run by means of the complete tune. With sound coming in any respect angles, I felt utterly immersed within the music. It was … wild.

“That’s something, huh?” Mike is smiling. “Now try this.” He places on an ATMOS model of Faith No More’s Epic, a tune Mike is aware of very properly as a result of he produced the unique for the band again in 1989.

The guitar assault is spectacular, eclipsed solely by the bassline, which reveals itself to be extra intricate and heavy than the usual stereo combine allowed. Vocals come from all instructions. It’s like I’m within the studio with the organized round me. I’m enveloped in music from all instructions.

Will and Matt take me by means of extra of their work. A 20-year-old Jason Mraz tune. An impossibly tight group enjoying fashionable big-band music. A observe metallic band with layers and layers of guitars and vocals utterly engulfs the listener in waves of wonderful noise. When the final notice dies out, I can solely sit there in amazement. I’ve change into a believer.

Before right this moment, I’d been very skeptical about this new expertise. Why attempt to enhance on songs which might be already classics? Wouldn’t this be like attempting to make the Mona Lisa extra high-res? Aren’t you messing with the artists’ authentic imaginative and prescient? Are you creating new requirements for this music once we’ve been effective with what we’ve had all these years? And who can afford a house audio system with 13 audio system, all particularly organized and powered by amps that require their very own modular reactor?

Detractors will level to the failure of quadraphonic sound within the early Nineteen Seventies. Super Audio CDs and DVD-Audio didn’t work, both. Yeah, there are some nice 5.1, 6.1, 7.1, and past mixes of basic albums accessible in field units that sound nice on a house theatre, however these are for obsessives and audiophiles. What makes anybody assume that this newest try to deliver additional excessive constancy to the plenty goes to work? (Sony additionally has one thing referred to as 360 Reality Audio which follows completely different specs. I’m instructed Sony is struggling to get this adopted by the trade.)

Will is affected person with me. “If you look at the size of these files, they’re huge. That B-52’s file is more than two gigabytes. Compare that to around 70 megabytes for the original .wav of song and maybe eight megs for an MP3 version. That’s because this file contains lots and lots of information, including metadata that will allow the file to be ‘folded down’ into both a 5.1 mix and a stereo mix. In fact, what we’re really going for is an immersive listening experience on headphones. Any headphones — although like with anything, the better the hardware, the better the software — the music — will sound.”

Headphones, it seems, are the primary goal of these selling the brand new expertise. In truth, you could have already skilled Spatial Audio if you happen to’ve acquired Apple Music or have downloaded specifically encoded songs from iTunes. Instead of “oh, that sound is coming from the left and those sounds are coming from the right,” Spatial Audio tracks suck you in just a little deeper. I nonetheless haven’t discovered a recording that brings the sound ahead so it appears to be coming from in entrance (headphone listening usually offers you the ship that a lot of the music is coming from behind), however it’s definitely an enchancment.

Another benefit? The ATMOS requirements demand far much less compression on the end information. The quantity of dynamic vary that’s preserved within the recording is insane. Unlike “loudness wars” casualties just like the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication and St. Anger from Metallica — two albums I discover unlistenable as a result of they’re compressed to the purpose of distortion — these ATMOS mixes breathe to the purpose the place you’ll be able to hear the area between the notes. It is completely three-dimensional, identical to whenever you see a reside live performance. The music appears to return from in every single place suddenly.

Glancing on the folder stuffed with mixes in progress, I see some very huge names, together with a pair with unreleased albums which might be within the means of getting ATMOS-ized. Those have been off-limits to me, after all.

Will ATMOS and Spatial Audio change into the brand new normal?  Maybe, particularly since so many individuals devour music by means of headphones. Will they discover after twenty years of listening to horrible MP3-quality audio? Will they even care?

Skeptics will say that that is simply an try to get us to purchase extra audio gear. Yes, it’s, however we haven’t had a mainstream revolution in audio constancy because the compact disc. Others level out that the individuals with an curiosity in these new mixes are pushed by revenue. Of course, they’re! That’s the way it works. And except I’m mistaken, creating new mixes like these additionally means you’re creating new grasp recordings, thereby resetting the countdown clock on copyright again to zero. That means these songs will keep out of the general public area longer.

And there are extra functions past music. We’re heading into the period of the metaverse. Entirely immersive 3D sound goes to be an enormous deal. Maybe, simply possibly, that is the brand new tech we’ve been ready for.

On the drive again to Hollywood, I couldn’t get that B-52’s combine out of my head. It left me with such an excellent feeling that didn’t even thoughts the bump-and-grind on the 405.

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Alan Cross is a broadcaster with Q107 and 102.1 the Edge and a commentator for Global News.

Subscribe to Alan’s Ongoing History of New Music Podcast now on Apple Podcast or Google Play

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