A brand new have a look at excessive constancy music: The rise of Dolby ATMOS and Spatial Audio – National

VAN NUYS, CALIFORNIA — Just off the freeway within the Valley is the Sound City Complex, a horseshoe-shaped constructing in the midst of an industrial zone. The web site as soon as featured the famed Sound City recording studios the place everybody from Fleetwood Mac to Nirvana to Johnny Cash made among the world’s well-known data. Across the car parking zone is one other studio, however it’s dedicated to one thing totally totally 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 possibly can have 13?

The fundamental 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 steel 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 screens, is completely surrounded by extra audio system. Everything operates from a wild laptop 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 out of the blue seems and provides melodic heft to the midrange. And it seems that the celebration sounds that we hear in numerous locations within the tune truly run by way of your entire tune. With sound coming in any respect angles, I felt fully 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 nicely 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 way of extra of their work. A 20-year-old Jason Mraz tune. An impossibly tight group taking part in trendy big-band music. A monitor steel band with layers and layers of guitars and vocals fully engulfs the listener in waves of superb noise. When the final word dies out, I can solely sit there in amazement. I’ve turn into a believer.

Before in the present day, I’d been very skeptical about this new expertise. Why attempt to enhance on songs which are already classics? Wouldn’t this be like attempting to make the Mona Lisa extra high-res? Aren’t you messing with the artists’ unique imaginative and prescient? Are you creating new requirements for this music once we’ve been tremendous 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 out there 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 and deliver further excessive constancy to the lots goes to work? (Sony additionally has one thing referred to as 360 Reality Audio which follows totally different specs. I’m informed 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 might have already skilled Spatial Audio in case you’ve obtained 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 a little bit deeper. I nonetheless haven’t discovered a recording that brings the sound ahead so it appears to be coming from in entrance (headphone listening typically 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 recordsdata. 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 possibly can hear the area between the notes. It is totally three-dimensional, similar to once you see a stay live performance. The music appears to return from in all places all of sudden.

Glancing on the folder crammed with mixes in progress, I see some very large names, together with a pair with unreleased albums which are within the strategy of getting ATMOS-ized. Those had been off-limits to me, after all.

Will ATMOS and Spatial Audio turn into the brand new customary?  Maybe, particularly since so many individuals devour music by way 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 and get us to purchase extra audio gear. Yes, it’s, however we haven’t had a mainstream revolution in audio constancy for the reason that 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 until 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 perhaps, 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 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.

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