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Spatial audio - hardware?
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Firmware. It's your phone that supports Dolby Atmos which then gets transcoded to AirPods.
All existing and future headphones and earbuds support Dolby Atmos. Atmos processes encoded files with knowledge of your speaker arrangement to place sound spatially. Processing is done on the iPhone, iPad, Mac -- the two channel output will drive any set of headphones on planet Earth.
Apple says they will turn on dynamic head tracking this fall. That requires gyroscopes in the headphones, which only AirPods Pro and Mac have.
Does this mean it will work with Bose wireless NC cans? Have a long flight tomorrow and looking forward to checking this out. I also have AirPods Pro, but the NC is better on the Bose.
Wow! This is my first business flight since February of 2020 and as a million miler I’ve never been so excited to fly! When I download these albums in which the songs are on from the Atmos playlists, will all the songs be Atmos quality? For instance the sublime album, Abbey Road, the Tom Petty album from the Rock Atmos playlist?
On Apple support page:
Spatial audio (for movies) requires H1 chip. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211775
Spatial audio for Apple Music does not. (Can play on regular AirPods) https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212182
The waters surrounding spatial audio (no pun intended?) are cloudy indeed!
Spatial audio (for movies) requires H1 chip. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211775
Spatial audio for Apple Music does not. (Can play on regular AirPods) https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212182
The waters surrounding spatial audio (no pun intended?) are cloudy indeed!
Right now it is specific tracks only. Remixing is elaborate requiring collaboration between artists and audio engineers. This is not like Appel Lossless, were the master are just fed through a CODEC.
I'm betting that the chip is involved with the head tracking. I think spatial audio is just a flag in a regular stereo track that turns on a DSP in the phone that alters the EQ and adds a little reverb.
While DSP is definitely happening in the iOS device I think it is a lot more than just taking a standard stereo track and adding a little reverb and EQ. If this was the case Apple would NOT need to use Dolby Atmos and could simply offer Spatial Audio on all tracks.
Apple must be using an Atmos track and then mapping the 3 dimensional objects metadata accordingly by following Dolby Atmos for Headphones implementation.
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If Apple is mapping the sound in three dimensional space, I don't know why they are going to the trouble, because the end result sounds nothing like three dimensional space. It's like a slight reverb that sounds like a voice in a small room with a concrete floor.
It isn't three dimensional space without the forward/back and up/down dimension. It's essentially a one dimensional space- left/right with sound objects plotted out on a line through the middle of both ears... just like normal headphones.
I really think this is more of a marketing and licensing deal than it is actual technology. They may have something they're going to introduce in the future that will get closer to the goal than this, but at this point Spatial Audio has less of an effect than the DSPs built into my 5.1 AV receiver. Since few people actually have multichannel speaker setups, I think they can get away with calling a reverb "spatial" because people won't know the difference.
It isn't three dimensional space without the forward/back and up/down dimension. It's essentially a one dimensional space- left/right with sound objects plotted out on a line through the middle of both ears... just like normal headphones.
I really think this is more of a marketing and licensing deal than it is actual technology. They may have something they're going to introduce in the future that will get closer to the goal than this, but at this point Spatial Audio has less of an effect than the DSPs built into my 5.1 AV receiver. Since few people actually have multichannel speaker setups, I think they can get away with calling a reverb "spatial" because people won't know the difference.
You say that because you probably have not yet heard any tracks that were actually recorded and mastered with Atmos. Existing music that's remixed after the fact for Atmos can only approximate what's possible.
This is incorrect. You only have two ears, you don't have forward/back/up/down ears. Yet with those two you hear sound in three dimensions because of the way the waves reach your ears. Software can place sound in three dimensional space so that waves reaching your ears arrive as they would in a real soundspace.
I've heard Atmos tracks of movies on HBO Max and AppleTV using my iPhone 12 Pro Max and my AirPods Max. They don't sound dimensional like the same movies on my 5.1 speaker system sound. It sounds like a DSP applied to a stereo track.
We have two ears to determine sound location in space. Head tracking and secondary depth cues are just part of our ability to hear sound three dimensionally. There is a very good reason why binaural sound never caught on... it just doesn't work the same for everyone. They use a standard dummy head, which is great if you yourself have a standard dummy head. But everyone's heads, shoulders, ears and ear canals are all shaped differently, and that can have a huge impact on the ability to hear position in space. Those factors are called HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function), and they are the single most important factor in dimensional audio. With speakers, we use our built in biological HRTF and it works perfect. But when you are slapping transducers on the sides of your head, that HRTF needs to be calibrated and synthesized or the whole impression of depth falls apart.
Maybe there is someone somewhere going "Wow! I can hear stuff behind me with this Spatial Audio!" But I'm not. For me it is a total bust. It sounds like stereo run through a DSP to me. The Smyth Realiser can simulate dimensional sound pretty well I'm told, but that has a complex system of HRTF calibration and settings to simulate virtual speaker placement and the effect of the room on the sound. Apple's Spatial Audio has almost no settings. It just can't do the same thing the Smyth Realiser does.
I have a large collection of multichannel music. It was mixed and mastered for discrete multichannel playback with speaker systems. I would like to know if Apple's Atmos multichannel is mixed for Atmos, or if it is upscaled. If someone out there has the Abby Road blu-ray, it would be very interesting to compare that mix to the Atmosphere one on Apple Music. Do you think they are the same? Or is the Apple one an up mix from stereo? Are all of the Atmos tracks on Apple multichannel mixes, or are some up mixes? That would be interesting to find out, but Apple and Dolby aren't going to tell you. Someone has to compare and find out.
We have two ears to determine sound location in space. Head tracking and secondary depth cues are just part of our ability to hear sound three dimensionally. There is a very good reason why binaural sound never caught on... it just doesn't work the same for everyone. They use a standard dummy head, which is great if you yourself have a standard dummy head. But everyone's heads, shoulders, ears and ear canals are all shaped differently, and that can have a huge impact on the ability to hear position in space. Those factors are called HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function), and they are the single most important factor in dimensional audio. With speakers, we use our built in biological HRTF and it works perfect. But when you are slapping transducers on the sides of your head, that HRTF needs to be calibrated and synthesized or the whole impression of depth falls apart.
Maybe there is someone somewhere going "Wow! I can hear stuff behind me with this Spatial Audio!" But I'm not. For me it is a total bust. It sounds like stereo run through a DSP to me. The Smyth Realiser can simulate dimensional sound pretty well I'm told, but that has a complex system of HRTF calibration and settings to simulate virtual speaker placement and the effect of the room on the sound. Apple's Spatial Audio has almost no settings. It just can't do the same thing the Smyth Realiser does.
I have a large collection of multichannel music. It was mixed and mastered for discrete multichannel playback with speaker systems. I would like to know if Apple's Atmos multichannel is mixed for Atmos, or if it is upscaled. If someone out there has the Abby Road blu-ray, it would be very interesting to compare that mix to the Atmosphere one on Apple Music. Do you think they are the same? Or is the Apple one an up mix from stereo? Are all of the Atmos tracks on Apple multichannel mixes, or are some up mixes? That would be interesting to find out, but Apple and Dolby aren't going to tell you. Someone has to compare and find out.
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I have found quite a few albums that were mentioned in the Atmos playlists where only the song on the playlist was actually Atmos and the rest of the album wasn't. Think this might be common for the time being.