Atmos (New Surround Sound Gimmick)

Has anybody listened to any records mixed this way? It sounds like an awful idea to me.

This New York Times article gets pretty detailed, and offers some welcome skepticism:

Susan Rogers, a longtime engineer for Prince, left the music industry in the late ’90s to become a cognitive neuroscientist. Last fall, Dolby invited her to the company headquarters in San Francisco to listen to a new Atmos mix of Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” a track she originally worked on.

“As both an engineer and as a psychoacoustician, I have mixed feelings about whether it’s an improvement,” Rogers said in a phone interview.

She noted that there are evolutionary and biological reasons that sound sources coming from behind and above listeners can be unsettling or anxiety inducing. She also observed that music is a potent form of communication in large part because the consummatory phase happens entirely in the listener’s head. Having clearer and more sound sources can actually make it harder to know what to pay attention to.

“That was what I noticed listening to ‘When Doves Cry’ in Atmos,” Rogers said. “It sounded amazing, but it was more difficult to assemble it into a unified whole in that private place I listen to music. I found it distracting.” Her “knee-jerk reaction was ‘do not want,’” she said. “But over time I may learn to like it.”

Read that article a couple days ago and was wondering if anyone had formed a thread yet. I think it's worth quoting a couple other passages here, and I also think putting "Gimmick" in the thread title undersells the potential for this to become a new norm.

DOLBY ATMOS, INTRODUCED in 2012, was initially developed for movie theaters and the home theater market. Because it offers a wider palette than stereo, and differs from traditional 5.1 and 7.1 channel setups, Atmos allows engineers — typically mixing across a dozen or more speakers — to put sound sources in front, to the side, behind and even above the listener.

“When you take sounds and you separate them from each other,” Couling said, “you will be able to hear those sounds independently much more clearly than if they are on top of each other. By creating space, we also create depth and clarity — and we found that’s what content creators really wanted.”

For artists like Chic’s founder, Nile Rodgers, immersive audio is the closest thing to the musician’s experience. “When I’m making a record, I’m sitting in a room with the band,” Rodgers said during a video chat, “we’re playing and jamming and what happens is the sound is bathing us. That’s what music sounds like to me.”

Listening to Dolby Atmos mixes in a professional recording studio can be a powerful experience. “It’s remarkably seductive,” said Clearmountain, who’s done Atmos projects for Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones and others. “I’ve played Atmos tracks for so many people who say, ‘I can never listen to stereo again.’ People have been in tears, moved by what they were hearing. It has an incredible effect.”

ONE OF THE reasons other highly touted surround sound technologies like 5.1 and 7.1 failed to catch on is because they required a specific speaker configuration. Dolby Atmos, however, is scalable and can adapt to a variety of setups.

Given its success in the headphones market, Apple has emphasized playback on its AirPods and Beats Fit Pro devices, which all offer a version of the Atmos experience with dynamic head tracking (where the sound shifts along with a user’s movement) in the $200 to $500 range. A number of other manufacturers, including Audeze, RIG, Corsair and LG, also offer Atmos headphones and earbuds.

The options for affordable home music systems, ones purpose-built for Atmos audio, have been limited. Amazon and Apple have long offered their own Atmos-enabled smart speakers, but neither really conveyed the full range of sound possible.

In March, Sonos introduced a first of its kind sub-$500 speaker, the Era 300, which more successfully packages the Atmos experience into a single compact unit, equipped with a half-dozen drivers that direct sound left, right, forward and upward.

The Grammy-winning mixing and mastering engineer Emily Lazar, who helped test and fine tune the Era 300, hopes it will be the start of tech companies bringing more viable Atmos options to market.

“No one who’s listened to Atmos in a properly tuned, beautiful-sounding studio can deny what it offers,” she said. “How now can we deliver that in a smaller package so everybody can afford it and have that same kind of experience is going to be key moving forward.”

I've not heard anything mixed in Atmos myself, but the fact that Apple is investing so heavily in it -- not just in their tech but also in the actual effort to remix a huge catalog of popular albums -- and mainstream speaker manufacturers like Sonos are already adopting it into single-unit systems suggests this could be the real deal.

my understanding is that it sucks

Curious if the current reactions to Atmos are in any way similar to initial impressions of stereo (which was also first introduced with motion pictures). There was a lot of gimmickry early on with stereo -- tons of novelty stereo records that had songs ping-ponging from one speaker to another -- and it was expensive: in addition to listeners having to buy new equipment, stereo albums were priced higher than mono for years. Was anyone in the '50s saying, "This is crap! Mono sounds better!" ? Will the excitement over gimmicky "hey, where's that sound coming from?" Atmos mixes eventually settle down into tasteful mixes?

I haven't heard Atmos myself, but like anything else, any fault would be in its application rather than in the system itself, provided the system actually works as advertised. Quadrophonic failed because you had to shell out for a ton of gear but you didn't get anything close to four distinct channels -- it was, in the words of one engineer, "a big mono."

i've been hearing about atmos mixes where vocal or instrumental elements are missing that are present and essential to the stereo mix, so i think the quality is often down to like... how good the atmos mix is. and there's no way of knowing that without listening. idk, i kinda refuse to fuck with it unless it really takes off and i can't avoid fucking with it

i have a lot of suspicions and grievances toward home theater tech tho. my parents did a surround sound w/ soundbar setup and one of the speakers is blown out and it drives me fucking insane. who cares, i'm using headphones

Was anyone in the '50s saying, "This is crap! Mono sounds better!" ?

Absolutely yes. I mean, until about 1965 and maybe even later, music was recorded in mono and then split into stereo, so the definitive versions of, say, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue or John Coltrane's Giant Steps are the mono versions.

Orbital's new album came with both 5.1 and Atmos mixes by the Radiophonic Workshop's Mark Ayres, but only on a pressed-to-preorders bluray with a 14-day window.

“I wanted to push it with the Atmos Mix. I don’t see any point in doing something like this and then not having a bit of fun with it. Luckily, Paul agreed. We said: “Let’s go to town on it and let’s make it exciting. Let’s make it different”. I spent a quite a few days mixing it, and then Paul came down for a day and we went through it all and tweaked it”.

to me it all reads like a push for everybody to get used to VR and gizmos like that. spatial stuff

similar to how web development and publishing and news all now have this lens of 'connecting to larger audiences' or 'accessibility' when it all boils down to people pushing smartphones to be honest – and trying to gaslight everyone that the experience is better for the reader.

Has Matmos ever mixed anything for Atmos?
Why no Matmos in Atmos?

"Quadrophonic failed because you had to shell out for a ton of gear but you didn't get anything close to four distinct channels -- it was, in the words of one engineer, 'a big mono.'"

Could you explain what you mean by this? I have an SACD player and listen to a great deal of music recorded in 5.1 surround sound. On certain mixes of rock music, and on recordings of classical-music repertoire that have a spatial element (players dispersed through the hall) there are definitely five distinct channels. On other rock mixes or ordinary classical repertoire, the 5.1 format only lends a greater sense of depth, but it’s nice enough that I feel the lack of it if I listen to the same thing in stereo.

Was anyone in the '50s saying, "This is crap! Mono sounds better!" ?

I still say this today wrt to some albums!

I've not heard anything mixed in Atmos myself, but the fact that Apple is investing so heavily in it -- not just in their tech but also in the actual effort to remix a huge catalog of popular albums -- and mainstream speaker manufacturers like Sonos are already adopting it into single-unit systems suggests this could be the real deal.

― Indexed, Friday, June 23, 2023 10:03 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

the fact that apple is investing so heavily in it is what makes me think it's bullshit

"Quadrophonic failed because you had to shell out for a ton of gear but you didn't get anything close to four distinct channels -- it was, in the words of one engineer, 'a big mono.'"

Could you explain what you mean by this? I have an SACD player and listen to a great deal of music recorded in 5.1 surround sound. On certain mixes of rock music, and on recordings of classical-music repertoire that have a spatial element (players dispersed through the hall) there are definitely five distinct channels. On other rock mixes or ordinary classical repertoire, the 5.1 format only lends a greater sense of depth, but it’s nice enough that I feel the lack of it if I listen to the same thing in stereo.

you are talking about native 5.1 recordings made after 1999. tarfumes is talking about fake 4.0 mixes sold in the 1970s, on systems that have not been on the market since.

my friend's dad had an old quad system in their house when we were kids. was really weird. it was build into a wall-sized bookcase, the stereo console was in the middle and there were four speakers - one at each far corner upper left, upper right, bottom left, bottom right.

there was a joystick thing on the stereo where you could sort of shift the "center" of the music - imagine a combo of the balance/fade controls in a car stereo.

it was weird and after you messed with the joystick for fun a few times it didn't really have any advantage, especially since the speakers were all on the same plane.

tbc I think some dose of skepticism is totally justified, but the pro quotes in that article had me at least curious to hear what the fuss was about. Am I wrong to think this could democratize a sound that audiophiles spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to achieve?

"you are talking about native 5.1 recordings made after 1999. tarfumes is talking about fake 4.0 mixes sold in the 1970s"

Yes, I understand that, which is why I asked him to explain further. If 1970s quadrophonic recordings were so primitive, then that is a surprise to me. Especially as 5.1 SACDs like The Dark Side of the Moon were often claimed to bring back the quadrophonic experience that had been lost to ordinary record buyers for years.

this is a good overview of the various quad/surround formats attempted through the years

https://immersiveaudioalbum.com/quadraphonic-reissues-a-brief-history-collectors-guide/

If anything it seems like a handy format to extract stems -- are people already doing that?

i thought Atmos was like at least 5 years old at this point? i think someone who used to post here wrote something about it back then?

No one who’s listened to Atmos in a properly tuned, beautiful-sounding studio can deny what it offers

"Nobody who has spent $50k plus on a music listening room can deny what it offers"

Was anyone in the '50s saying, "This is crap! Mono sounds better!" ?
I still say this today wrt to some albums!
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown),

ahh i remember the halcyon days of when people argued re the Beatles Mono boxset sounding better than the stereo version.

i mean everything up to Sgt. Pepper's is clearly so much better in mono, doesn't need to be argued tbh

Am I wrong to think this could democratize a sound that audiophiles spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to achieve?

― Indexed, Friday, June 23, 2023 1:45 PM (two hours ago)

ime the audiophile spending 5-6 figures on a sound system is spending that on a stereo system. furthermore, the grail for many audiophiles is the completely analog signal stream that is unadulterated by any sort of digital processing whatsoever. the affordable version of this for home use is from what I can tell on the other end of that extreme - using fancy digital signal processing to make a single sound source (or a pair of headphones) sound like it's 10 speakers built into the wall around you. this would make most audiophiles want to immediately wretch and vomit into their $150,000 horn speakers handcrafted from african blackwood.

SFJ wrote about Atmos in his newsletter today:

This NYT piece on Dolby Atmos and spatial audio is fairly bullish on the technology, enough so that I am moved to share an outtake from the Harper’s piece on speakers. Short version: multi-speaker formats can be amazing and elevated or whatever if the process is 1:1. Make a thing in Atmos and play it back in the same environment? Great. But most of what’s in play here was mixed and recorded for stereo playback and is being sold—after being Atmos-ized—in a format that apes the spatial experience for a headphone setting. (Some people, not many, will have an actual multi-speaker format and life is different for them. Bully for these folks.) We are talking about tricks, in other words, not that there’s anything wrong with tricks.

Recorded music formats have been plagued by a sense of compromise from the start. According to Chris Kyriakakis, Professor of Audio and Acoustics at USC, everyday sound events come at a listener from approximately 10,000 directions. Perhaps with this in mind, a Bell Labs study carried out by Harvey Fletcher in 1931 recommended that audio be rendered in three channels: left, right, and center. Fletcher determined that three channels was the closest plausible route forward to achieve realistic sound reproduction, a way to at least approximate the experience of those many directional sounds. This approach had been nicknamed stereophonic, from the Greek root, stereos, which means solid and three-dimensional, not two. The industry went with two, rather than three, but kept the word stereophonic. Alan Blumlein, the British engineer who developed theoretical models for much of the stereo experience, including the stereo LP groove, died doing military research and did not see his concepts made real. Something about recorded music feels a bit cursed.

Almost exactly one hundred years after Western Electric invented superior sound for home hi-fi enthusiasts who did not yet exist by making speakers for the cinema, headphone listeners are inheriting a protocol also made for movies, though the audio fidelity outcome is the opposite: trash. Apple recently introduced Spatial Audio, a feature that uses Dolby Atmos software to make sounds move around through the binaural field. Developed in 2010 for movie theaters, Atmos is a way of mixing sound so that it travels to an array of physical points. In the world of movies and some surround sound music systems, this means sending audio into dozens of speakers above and behind audience members. Have you seen Thor: Ragnarok? The sound in that movie is a product of Dolby Atmos, mixed in a studio not unlike the theater you ended up sitting in. I loved that particular experience, and I think spatial audio systems can be powerful, especially in the movies, themselves, where Dolby Atmos was designed to be used. Again, movies came first. But there is a hitch this time.

What you now see on your phone as Spatial Audio, or Dolby Atmos, both complete with corporate logos, is not Atmos as you hear it in a movie theater. What you have on your phone is a “fold down” of all the x, y, z axis metadata bundled into a Atmos mix, the information that sends pieces of audio to specific speakers, when there are actually lots of speakers present. Your phone has one speaker and a stereo output. Apple’s Spatial Audio software uses perceptual tricks of EQ and placement, to fold down the multi-speaker experience into a binaural mix for that stereo output. What does this actually sound like? Jon Leidecker, of Negativland and Wobbly, and a former Dolby Atmos employee, described it as a “big reverb button,” and I think this is fair. In March, someone named KamranV at Digital Music News wrote: “At the risk of sounding reductive, Atmos+Apple Music sounds bad.”

Apple lent me a pair of their Airpod Max headphones, which are confusingly named, since they are not Airpods—they are comfortable over-ear headphones. In the morning, when I switch back and forth between web radio stations, they are ideal. The noise-canceling is effective and I feel appropriately isolated from the other inhabitants of my small East Village apartment. The sound quality is papery and clean, with slightly more bass than necessary, which I like. This is now a common attribute of low volume settings like headphones. I know my drink is being sweetened and I like it. But if you don’t like bass, it’s not sweet. The problem with mass culture products is that you can only amplify a few valuables and still keep it simple, so choices are made for you before you even buy the thing.

I wanted to know what Spatial Audio was, and having appropriately clicked the settings on the preferred gear, I listened to both new and old songs in Spatial Audio mixes. The new version of Blondie’s “Hanging On The Telephone” makes it sounds as if Debbie Harry has been placed at the front of the room, several feet away from the other musicians. The effect is not unpleasant but reduces the delicious tension of the original, where the singer and her band are all in the same phone booth. When I asked Chris Stein of Blondie about this mix, he had not heard it (though his manager said they had nominally approved the idea with Apple).

“I’m not a big headphones listener,” Stein told me.

My objection, which is firm but mild, is not that Spatial Audio is a terrible idea, any more than surround sound is now or quadraphonic stereo was in the Seventies. Ideally, an artist creates a sound object that can be reproduced in the way they envisioned. This is not the case with the Spatial Audio mix of Blondie, where a new protocol has been imposed from the outside, and not because the artist asked for it. Perhaps artists will create new mixes for Spatial Audio that make use of what the protocol has to offer, but a huge number of labels and listeners would have to adopt this approach for it be significant, convenient, or both.

trying to think what the target audience for this is - is it just a way to make boomers buy born to run in yet another format? the way zoomers consume music i can't imagine this getting anywhere close to mainstream adoption? like a pc music song that was done entirely on a computer was never going to have 10 channels that correspond with spatial orientation anyway? idk

My objection, which is firm but mild, is not that Spatial Audio is a terrible idea, any more than surround sound is now or quadraphonic stereo was in the Seventies. Ideally, an artist creates a sound object that can be reproduced in the way they envisioned. This is not the case with the Spatial Audio mix of Blondie, where a new protocol has been imposed from the outside, and not because the artist asked for it. Perhaps artists will create new mixes for Spatial Audio that make use of what the protocol has to offer, but a huge number of labels and listeners would have to adopt this approach for it be significant, convenient, or both.

In a world where everybody streams music … Why? There’re dozens of implementations in games.

Are the vocal tracks mutable in software? Seems like an easy way to get Karaoke mode.

Could you explain what you mean by this? I have an SACD player and listen to a great deal of music recorded in 5.1 surround sound. On certain mixes of rock music, and on recordings of classical-music repertoire that have a spatial element (players dispersed through the hall) there are definitely five distinct channels. On other rock mixes or ordinary classical repertoire, the 5.1 format only lends a greater sense of depth, but it’s nice enough that I feel the lack of it if I listen to the same thing in stereo.

5.1 and quadrophonic are entirely different systems. 5.1 was kind of what quadrophonic promised but failed to deliver. There were a number of quadrophonic mixes done in the ‘70s, but the main issue was that there were two competing systems, one developed by RCA and one by CBS. One of those (I forget which) was far less effective than the other, but unfortunately, it was also the one most labels adopted for their quadrophonic releases.

The original plan for Quadrophenia was to mix it in quadrophonic — and in fact, multiple distinct PA channels were used for parts of the Who’s stage performance of it in 1973 (though Pink Floyd got there first). But when the record’s engineer, Ron Nevison, connected a quadraphonic test unit he was sent by MCA, there was barely any discernible difference between the four channels. He said it was “a big mono,” so they scrapped the idea of quadrophonic mixes. And the consumer market reflected that disappointment, with people spending loads of money on entirely new systems that sounded worse, and less defined, than stereo, and the idea of quadrophonic being dead in the water by 1975.

5.1 did what everyone hoped quadrophonic would do.

"you are talking about native 5.1 recordings made after 1999. tarfumes is talking about fake 4.0 mixes sold in the 1970s"

Yes, I understand that, which is why I asked him to explain further. If 1970s quadrophonic recordings were so primitive, then that is a surprise to me. Especially as 5.1 SACDs like The Dark Side of the Moon were often claimed to bring back the quadrophonic experience that had been lost to ordinary record buyers for years.

https://em-content.zobj.net/thumbs/240/sony/336/person-shrugging_1f937.png

Thanks, Tarfumes, for the explanation. Pity that the poster right after you missed your point.

my apologies for erroneously pretending that words have meanings, like a meticulous 7.1 spatial recording with individually-placed microphones, instead of incoherently posting on vague vibes, like a 1970s fourth-party quad mix being waggled with a joystick

trying to think what the target audience for this is - is it just a way to make boomers buy born to run in yet another format? the way zoomers consume music i can't imagine this getting anywhere close to mainstream adoption? like a pc music song that was done entirely on a computer was never going to have 10 channels that correspond with spatial orientation anyway? idk

A typical modern pop song can easily have 60+ audio tracks - each one of which has been quantized, fine-tuned, or otherwise messed with. There's easily enough computational power and these giant mixes are just how everyone works now. Why wouldn't you? Going spatial just means adding a new pan control and an additional track of mix info into in the file, because songs are pieces of software now.

I don't believe that any of this will make music sound better - like autotune, it's just another thing to contend with and everyone will use it because they can. I've only sat through one "How to mix in Atmos" demo session and my feeling was that none of the folks there were interested in spatial boomer or gen-x rock, but either in making their mixes sound like an action movie and/or as spatially disorienting as possible. idk.

I think it splits a few ways:

Movie theaters are always looking for technical improvements to tout, audio nerds working in film like having gimmicks, this one seems like a tweak on some of the prior surround options. And in theory it's a format you can mix for without having to make a bunch of tweaks for the home release

Home theater has always had the people who are enthusiastic about movies and surround sound, etc. but it's a tough sell to people who tune out the moment you not only want to sell them two speakers they're required to find room for, but maybe three or four additional ones plus a receiver.
There's always the dudes in their 20s who have a crappy apartment but have a 5.1 setup that's cobbled together from a bunch of things they bought at Best Buy or scavenged off craigslist. Or the suburban basement man cave (I know multiple people who were the second owners of suburban houses and when they moved in there were two holes in the back corners by the ceiling with wires hanging out, and maybe even cheap wall-mounted speakers left behind).
Atmos kind of opens this up because you get a surround effect by bouncing audio off the ceiling from the front so you can say, hey, you get part of the experience but the speakers are smaller now, maybe just a tv sound bar which seem to have gotten popular because tv speakers aren't so hot, and you don't need shit all over your living room. Just a little bonus? I haven't listened to any home audio Atmos setups

Music is kind of a mixed proposition. I've got some Apple headphones that support spatial audio but I'm usually moving around while listening, which kills it if you're listening off your phone. When you start listening, it assumes your head position in relation to your device position is neutral. So if you move your head around, the mix changes as if you're panning around in the audio. If an instrument's mixed higher in the right channel and you turn your head right it gets louder, etc. I usually leave spatial turned on but turn off the head tracking and it sounds slightly more interesting than stereo in that there's the sense of space between the elements but you could probably get most of the same effect from a spatial audio plugin from the 2000s (shout out to whichever one I pirated and used in foobar2000)

tl;dr if you watch movies while using headphones that support Atmos that's probably the best bang for your buck right now

sort of relevant

https://dadadrummer.substack.com/p/one-hundred-and-twenty-four-speakers

I don't believe that any of this will make music sound better - like autotune, it's just another thing to contend with and everyone will use it because they can. I've only sat through one "How to mix in Atmos" demo session and my feeling was that none of the folks there were interested in spatial boomer or gen-x rock, but either in making their mixes sound like an action movie and/or as spatially disorienting as possible. idk.

― Elvis Telecom, Monday, July 17, 2023 10:08 AM (one week ago)

yeah as i was typing my post i was secretly thinking well yeah, if i were an avant grade music artist and 'spatialness' was available to me as something to fuck around with, of course i'd want to. whether that makes your music more interesting is a whole nother question, obviously. i think the piece i linked to above gets into that.

This approach had been nicknamed stereophonic, from the Greek root, stereos, which means solid and three-dimensional, not two. The industry went with two, rather than three, but kept the word stereophonic

weirdly we have only two eyes and not three and yet we see in 3d “stereo” hmmm also i wonder if choosing two speakers vs 10,000 has anything to do with having us two ears and not 10,000 hmmm these exercises are left for the reader to complete

sorry i like sfj and don’t mean to clown on his writing but the snake oil the audio industry passes off as “realism” (elvis, mh and others otm) is incredible. it’d be like sony trying to sell you a fancy tv system so you can watch movies in “jungle vision” and it involves them putting potted tropical plants around your living room, ie sort of bs they did for 1950s b-movies (what 80s movie had the smell-o-vision gag??)

which actually is FINE for shit like jurassic part (t rex scene canonical example of why you might NEED a 5.1 system to do the film justice, esp the .1!!)

since then the home theatre and movie theatre are in line with the movie aspires to be, which is a literal theme park - another environment dotted with hidden speakers everywhere DO U SEE

Polyester, in Odorama.

haha yes!!

https://envelop.us/page/envelop-sf

I've been kind of interested in this space in SF but have never been to an event there. I think the entire immersive audio experience *could* be cool, especially if different speakers are doing different things in real three dimensional space, but even more traditional gimmicks (we're projecting visuals on a DOME!) only work if the content's actually interesting and something justifies the use of a novel space. Otherwise, it's just novelty and some music you could probably experience more comfortably elsewhere.

If you have a dome you should get some vintage science museum tilted seats and the show must at least as interesting as a Pink Floyd laser show from the 80s. I probably don't need spatial audio for a Carl Craig dj set

I feel something similar about these immersive art spaces that keep popping up and touring. They're generally not a good survey of an artist's work and they're just for posting on the gram

tbc I think some dose of skepticism is totally justified, but the pro quotes in that article had me at least curious to hear what the fuss was about. Am I wrong to think this could democratize a sound that audiophiles spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to achieve?

― Indexed, Friday, June 23, 2023 12:45 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

lmao

this is inception-level drinking the kool aid

it would be really funny if one or two atmos speakers sitting next to your tv actually sounded better spatially than some guy's 7.1 system that's wired into the walls

not democratizing, but funny

i would be down to get domed if someone could set up the quadraphonic pink floyd show

also i went to something similar to what you’re describing in a weird industrial space near candlestick park with psherburne. it was carsten nicolai projecting crazy bright LED projection on a sort of curved warehouse. not a literal dome, as exist for certain types of antenna testing, but close!

unfortunately it was ultra dry click and cut stuff, sort of what ryoji ikeda is doing now, except in high speed techno patterns. but the dry glitch sound meant no spatialization to it. so i went outside to smoke, ran into tigerbeat artist gold chainz, who was 86’d for drunk. i had cigs and he had some shake so we shared a spliff while he complained about the scene

OK, so I had a conversation today with producer John Snyder (worked with Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, did tons of archival jazz stuff for decades, blah blah blah) and he was telling me about how some Atmos "conversions" are being done and this is some snake-oil bullshit. In a lot of cases, they're taking stereo masters (not even the original tapes, but the album masters), playing them back in the big room of a studio with microphones set up in three different positions relative to the speaker horns, and using those new recordings to build the Atmos "mixes".

this could be next level shit when the next alvin lucier comes along

they're taking stereo masters (not even the original tapes, but the album masters), playing them back in the big room of a studio with microphones set up in three different positions relative to the speaker horns, and using those new recordings to build the Atmos "mixes".

jfc

What kind of mic cables are they using?

Not to defend the practice, but on the upcoming Who’s Next / Life House box, most of the Atmos mixes are from the original multitrack tapes. But at least one multitrack — which has “Bargain” and maybe one or two other songs — has been missing for decades. So they used the method described above to make the Atmos mixes of those songs. I imagine the rationale is, better to have a faux-Atmos mix from the only available source than none at all; people would wonder why all but two songs on the album have an Atmos mix.

i'd respect it more if they did even a mediocre job at extracting stems with ai or something instead of that nonsense

atmos seems like it's probably better for the mixers in giving them more control but probably not much of a noticeable upgrade vs. 5.1? and still just a gimmick in the same way surround has always been

extracting stems with ai or something

and do what with them? approximate a nice big room? Hearing about mic'ing the speakers makes me only more intrigued about this..lol. (i mean up a tick from 0, after screwing around with some mixes in an Apple Music trial, but yeah)

If I was a mixer or masterer interested in this, I wonder how I would even think of it. So you've got the main mix that's going to go out everywhere, and that's gotta be good for generally all scenarios and sorts of speakers and headphones. Gotta sound find on Yamaha NS-10s or whatever. Then you've got this specialty Atmos thing you can muck around with but... sometimes it's 7.1 speakers, sometimes it's a fancy soundbar, oh and a lot of times it's headphones. Like what are you supposed to do with it? Just go for "bigger" sound? Mic'd speakers in a fancy room sounds like the right approach.

and do what with them? approximate a nice big room?

just the usual surround-sound stuff? what else is there to do really - adding some room ambience to a stereo mix seems like the most useless thing possible to do

I guess. But surround went wide with DVD and pretty much no one cares. A big difference between this and selling 5.1 systems 20 years ago is that it's also being pushed for headphones, and I've got to think that's at least half the usage it's getting.