John Darko
In mid-January, Apple announced that it would soon pay artists “up to 10% higher royalties for music available in Spatial Audio”. Despite ‘up to’ doing the heavy lifting in that headline, Apple seems to be putting its money where its mouth is in backing Spatial Audio (Dolby Atmos) content.
Apple Music isn’t the only streaming service to offer Dolby Atmos streams but its 100 million subscriber base makes it the most popular — and back in 2021, when Apple Music made the dual announcement of hi-res audio and Spatial Audio provision, Apple’s Eddy Cue could be heard backing Spatial more than hi-res. It’s not hard to see why: play the CD-quality and hi-res versions of, say, Talking Heads’ Remain In Light back to back and you’ll not hear as big of a difference as when pitting the CD-quality version against the Spatial Audio version. It’s a similar story with Kraftwerk’s 3-D Der Katalog and Peter Gabriel’s i/o* [see Footnote #1]. Those deltas can even be heard behind Bluetooth headphones where the lossy compression can cause some higher-frequency sounds to subtly fray at their edges.
The terminology can quickly become confusing. Immersive Audio is a way to describe 3D audio formats that go beyond stereo with a height element. One of those formats is Dolby Atmos. Spatial Audio is Apple’s re-branding of Dolby Atmos.
Dolby Atmos is an object-based audio system that places sounds in 3-D space with x, y and z co-ordinates. The ‘z’ axis is the height component and each sound’s coordinates are held in the Dolby Atmos file’s metadata so that it ‘collapses’ elegantly as the number of available playback channels heads south. Sounds won’t vanish when only using, say, four ear-level loudspeakers, but the height effect might be diminished.
That elegant collapsing also extends to headphone users. Apple Music’s binaural renderer – essentially, a set of filters – allows a headphone’s two channels to approximate what we would otherwise hear at home from a 7.1.4 loudspeaker array’s twelve channels, where seven loudspeakers are placed at ear level – three in the front, two at the sides, two in the rear – and four are fixed to the ceiling. The .1 is the subwoofer.
If that sounds like hi-fi enthusiasm bleeding heavily into home improvement, you’d not be wrong. Per last year’s poll, only 6% of Darko.Audio YouTube channel viewers have put speakers in their ceiling. Perhaps that’s why a whopping 71% don’t do Dolby Atmos at all and of those that do, the majority use headphones.
As regular readers know, I am happy to install acoustic panels on my room’s walls and ceiling. So why not ceiling speakers as part of a Dolby Atmos setup? Never mind that ceiling speakers require professional installers to fix speaker brackets and handle the all-important cable routing — only studio bods and bachelors can let ’em dangle. My reasoning is far simpler than that: assuming we could find one million songs to stream in Spatial Audio from Apple Music, we’d still only be looking at 1% of the catalogue. And yet the Spatial Audio song count is a long way from reaching a million. Major lounge room upheaval for less than one percent of songs? It doesn’t add up, especially when we consider that acoustic panels benefit every single one of Apple Music’s 100 million songs.
This is why my Spatial Audio / Dolby Atmos fix comes via an iPhone (13 Mini) and AirPods (Pro 2 & Max) where Apple Music’s software applies a binaural renderer – which is different from Tidal and Amazon’s – to the Dolby Atmos source file. The result is then lossy compressed to fit down the Bluetooth pipe. Here, many purist audiophiles – especially those with an ‘over my dead body’ attitude towards lossy compression – must reconcile their insistence on lossless audio with a thirst for immersive content.
However, the result with headphones isn’t the 3D fireworks show that many imagine it to be. It’s a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of what we hear from a Dolby Atmos loudspeaker array installed in a professional studio. I know: I’ve done the comparison. With AirPods Pro 2 / Max, we hear cleaner separation of instrumental layers and wider headstaging from the Spatial version than we do from the stereo version. It’s why I prefer to think of the sound Apple’s Spatial Audio heard behind headphones as “Super Stereo”.
Apple is likely upping the royalty incentive for Spatial Audio content for two reasons. Firstly, it recognises that the Dolby Atmos version of any given release must be created by a human in a studio, which takes time and money. Secondly – and you’ll have to excuse the conspiracy theorising here – Apple wants Spatial Audio to succeed on its streaming platform because, in 99.9% of cases, there is no equivalent Blu-Ray release (containing a lossless version of the Dolby Atmos mix) that can be ripped and pirated.
Many audiophiles are equally bullish about immersive audio, telling me that “Spatial Audio / Dolby Atmos is the future of music playback”. I have my reservations — but I am not everyone. Experience tells me that minority interests can exploit the internet to disproportionately upsize their influence by shouting louder and more often. So instead, let’s put this claim to the test via a fresh YouTube community poll to better reflect any consensus opinion.
A whopping 12,000 people voted in this poll where the headline takeaway is this: only 5% of voters seem certain that Dolby Atmos / Spatial Audio is the future of music playback. Another 16% are inclined to partially agree. The upshot? 21% see a bright-ish future for immersive audio. On the fence sit 28% of all voters with the vast majority – 52% – partially or wholly disagreeing. Bears outnumber bulls 2:1. Now, that’s interesting.
* [Footnote 1] Mastering quality differences notwithstanding. The Bright-Side and Dark-Side mixes of i/o have been dynamically crushed to DR6 whilst the Spatial In-Side Mix registers a very healthy DR13.
