Engineer delivering fake "Atmos" mixes with only stereo content

[AYanguas]

Atmos mixes has to have output in the heights to be real Atmos to me on my 7.4.4 setup, in what way others choose to listen to Atmos mixes are not a concern for me.

I would add that Atmos mixes have to have output to the Wides, Four heights, and discrete output to the sides and rears, to be real Atmos for me on my 9.1.4 setup. Oh, I forgot, also output to the fronts and to the center.

Now seriously, I have listen to some Atmos mixes (I don't remember which ones) that had mainly sound on sides/rears and almost nothing on fronts. That sounded weird, and it looked as a kind of binaural or 360RA transcription.

I think we have to demand 'Good' Atmos mixes, discrete and balanced, regardless of whether they use all channels or not. For instance, Clearmountain mixes don't use very much heights but are good mixes with sides/rears.

Also, the 'standard' Atmos can be used for the delivery of Quad or 5.1 mixes, if there are no other delivery methods on the platform. Should they clearly mention the kind of mix delivered? as Suzanne Ciani does with the "Quadraphonic Live" title, at least? Well, Atmos is also a marketing word. If they say they use few channels, maybe there will be someone that will noy buy it.

 

[Strilo]

what an unprofessional cockwomble
if i find one such mix i will report it to Apple straight away.

Well said, Fred!

 

[jimfisheye]

Yesterday I heard from a fellow audio engineer that a producer-engineer that we both know - quite well known in general - is unhappy with having labels requiring him to deliver Atmos mixes, so he’s delivering ADM’s that only have content in the L and R speakers - stereo. ‘Here’s your f_cking Atmos mix….’ Not sure it will fly w the labels or Apple, etc. But it’s indicative of the continuing fight in the engineering/production communities…

These will be plentiful unfortunately. Atmos is first and foremost a copy protection format that requires a hardware purchase to get access to the decoder. (Unless you snipe a copy of the Dolby reference player app that they are keeping closely guarded and not licensing out at present.) Our extension on surround sound channels and 12 channel discrete music mixes are an aside to them. Consumers having to go out and buy a new shitbar to decode the new Taylor Swift or whatever are the target.

They want you to put a couple polite reverb wiggles in the surround and height channels though for your faux mixes. Just enough to call it 'not stereo' but not enough content in the surround channels to make too much distortion on a shitbar. I believe the mixes that sound like that are being made for precisely this reason.

I think Atmos mixes should have providence for the speaker array they were mixed on too! The above is why we aren't getting that. I DO think the system is crafty and I want to see people get weird with it! That might even include making a mix for more speakers than you have around you during the actual mix - just to be fair, although I can't really imagine anything that makes sense with that in a music mix context. But speaker array providence should be mandatory liner notes!

If that all sounds like a shitty bad attitude... Honestly I think all the faux stuff will fall on its face and be novelty at best. Like the rechanneled faux stereo albums in the late '60s. We kind of won this round in a big way! 7.1.4 is an official format and it's here to stay no matter what happens and no matter how many screwed up releases come out here and there.

There are a decent amount of very accomplished 12 channel mixes and a handful of truly stunning mixes that couldn't be delivered that way in any other format with any fewer speaker channels. The guys releasing faux mixes will end up humiliated.

 

[PurpleMoustache]

There is an Apple definition. “Dolby Audio” is 5.1 while “Dolby Atmos” places objects in a 3D space which implies height. Several 5.1 albums have been added to Apple Music as-is as “Dolby Audio” and that’s fine. Hopefully that’s what the posts above were referring to. If someone is taking a 5.1 mix and getting it labeled as “Dolby Atmos” without object/height information that is not right.

I also believe it’s a Dolby definition. I’ve seen the “Dolby Audio” moniker/logo on the backs of movie and game boxes. I think it’s what they’re re-branding all surround tech pre-Atmos

 

[humprof]

I know for a fact ( I talked to one label and tried to dissuade) that at least one label is choosing to take their 5.1 mixes and converting them, unchanged, no new mix, to the Dolby Atmos deliverable to the streamers. They said the clicks are higher when it says Atmos !!

I suppose you're not at liberty to say who that is, Ted. Are they aware of the "Dolby Audio" label? I mean...whether it's BIS or Concord/Telarc or some other label, I'd still be glad to see their catalog show up on Apple Music regardless. But continuing to muddy the waters about what to expect from an "Atmos" designation doesn't help anybody.

 

[barfle]

From my reading, which still isn’t technical enough for this retired EE, Atmos is an object-based release format. To me, that means a sound object (the documentation gives the examples of a siren and a crying child) can be placed anywhere in the sound field, and moved around at will. Apparently this means something akin to the dear old virtual center locations of stereo recordings. They use volume and phase relationships, and perhaps a few other parameters to make sounds seem like they are coming from a specific location in the room. Note that this does not require height channels unless the producer wants to include them. Objects can be placed at ear level if desired. That’s an artistic choice made by the producers (musicians, mixers, financial backers, et al).

Atmos includes the option of height speakers to allow 3D placement of the objects, but it is not a requirement of the format. A mono mix can be done in Atmos, although I can’t imagine why.

 

[ar surround]

A mono mix can be done in Atmos, although I can’t imagine why.

An aside comment: Auro 3D does a really nice job of upmixing mono material. It is still mono, but room filling mono.

 

[pat bateman]

These will be plentiful unfortunately. Atmos is first and foremost a copy protection format that requires a hardware purchase to get access to the decoder. (Unless you snipe a copy of the Dolby reference player app that they are keeping closely guarded and not licensing out at present.)

The 5.1 part of Atmos is just good ol' fashioned Dolby 5.1. In the case of lossy (streamed) Atmos, it's every other speaker beyond a 5.1 configuration that gets sounds from the Atmos metadata, which you would need the official decoder for, yes. I bring this up because since the 5.1 is unencrypted with Atmos, the discrete channels can be isolated and a mix can easily be verified as fake. The process is just the modern version of recording music from the radio to a tape. It really is that simple.

A couple weeks ago Trivium was the Featured Artist, and all the sudden 5 albums became available. I was immediately skeptical, and all 5 are fake after spot checking. They just took the front channels, copied them to the rear and turned the volume down a little bit. The center channel was empty with the occasional little "bleep bloop" sound to presumably fool an auto-detection sort of protocol Apple might have.

 

[armyjazzer]

There's a huge advantage in one format that can deliver all the different configurations to any system that supports that one format. My only issue with that is that one needs to figure it out on their own, it would be much better if each release clearly stated how many channels, what original format etc. My Oppo kicked the bucket and I got a Sony BD player, and it's refusing to play certain quad titles (it's playing DTS fine, but not Dolby), for example. There are some titles on Apple Music that are not Atmos, like the David Gilmour releases, and I can imagine how this could get messed up for some people with certain equipment that won't be able to recognise it - either now or in the future.

In the end of the day the issue is clear labeling I suppose, not the format of delivery which everyone will probably agree is much easier with one standard.

I agree. Honest labeling and no confusion to the consumer is the really important issue. It is also great when you buy discs that contain multiple formats on the same disc that you can compare, as in a Blu-ray that has the Quad 4.0 version, a 5.1 version and a full Atmos version. This is also great for consumers that don't have a full Atmos system yet, so they can listen to the formats they currently have, while having the option to listen to the Atmos version when they upgrade or add an Atmos setup in the future.

 

[MidiMagic]

Copy protection is another reason to not want Atmos.

 

[LuvMyQuad]

Copy protection is another reason to not want Atmos.

Over the decades, hasn't every digital MCH format involved copy protection to some extent? It was never a reason to avoid those older formats, why is Atmos any different?

 

[jimfisheye]

Copy protection is another reason to not want Atmos.

On the one hand I understand it's hard to sell software and media nowadays. It's easily sharable files now and not an impossible to make yourself physical thing. (eg. vinyl) So they looked for a way to tie media to hardware sales. I get it!

They're going just a little too hard IMHO. If they dialed it back just a little! Those of us who have been used to the last 30 years of computers and modular audio systems aren't very well going to go back to stand alone combo components like an AV receiver and revisit the 20th century! The MO is to add the amp channels and speakers and grab the new decoder software.

Refusing to even sell the media encoder (which includes the reference player app and is the only way to get the reference player which is not sold by itself in any way) to independent folks is what pushed me over the edge. I'll just badmouth them now and help anyone I can work around them. They could have put a $400 price tag on just the reference player app and kept it that high for their recoup period. I would have genuinely understood and just paid for it. They literally refused to take my money for the media encoder subscription when I tried to buy it.

It's just really sad because it's a crafty system and was at least loosely part of the push to extend the surround sound mix format to include 7.1.4 now.

There are some wild and very accomplished mixes being made for this! Sure, there's the faux stuff. There's pop music itself that's just phoned in too. Whatever. Maybe someone likes it! I think they kind of ended up really asking for it with faux Atmos mixes appearing by going hard being cryptic and not including original mix speaker array info in the liner notes. They want to put surround sound - er, excuse me, the new word is immersive - on the brochure but they want to sell copy protected media to stereo ear bud listeners.

 

[Sal1950]

Over the decades, hasn't every digital MCH format involved copy protection to some extent? It was never a reason to avoid those older formats, why is Atmos any different?

Not just MCH but every digital format from CD's going forward.
The hardest proved to be SACD's
We found ways to rip them also.

 

[LuvMyQuad]

Of all the formats, I'm surprised how easy it actually is to rip Atmos and play it back properly. Easier than SACDs.

 

[jimfisheye]

I guess the risk in selling software is someone buying it decides to share it and now it's out there for free forever and they can't sell it anymore?

I'm thinking there might be a line where people still want to buy something for the convenience rather than screw around with shared files? I suppose the marketing gurus went over the numbers and I'm wrong and they have to go hard or lose?

Sell it and make that income even though it gets shared and you lose a few sales. The other option is to not make it available for sale. So no income. Then someone still gets it and shares it and now they lose 100% of the sales! Doesn't it end up working that way?

 

[Sal1950]

Sell it and make that income even though it gets shared and you lose a few sales. The other option is to not make it available for sale. So no income. Then someone still gets it and shares it and now they lose 100% of the sales! Doesn't it end up working that way?

Corporate bean counters never seem to see the big picture.
It's always about the short term profits.

 

[pat bateman]

I guess the risk in selling software is someone buying it decides to share it and now it's out there for free forever and they can't sell it anymore?

The dark ages as the record labels would probably call it, safe to say was 2000 - 2012. It was a perfect storm. Any CD older than 30 days cost $19.99+ where most people would listen to 3 songs, and all the good songs were front loaded on the track list for listening station purposes. People were feeling duped. Then magical mp3s became a thing, fast internet, iPods, people my age who grew up amongst computers, and even non-tech savvy people could download whatever they wanted for free and felt vindicated for the times they were duped into buying a shit album and largely completed could care less that it was 128kbps. That's the way I felt at least. But even me, who ripped my own media, downloaded from Napster, when these music services started becoming available for $8/mo that had almost every piece of popular music ever recorded at your literal fingertips - that is a tough thing to say no to as a big music fan. I still curated my physical library, but in lockstep with my Apple Music library, and I listened to my Apple Music library 90% of the time.

Now with albums disappearing from streaming services, I still subscribe to Apple Music, but it's really just to preview things which is still a tremendous value to me @ $10/mo. Compared to driving to Tower Records and hopefully they had my taste of music on the listening stations. That's all very nostalgic and fun to think about, but I'll take previewing an album in my listening room, on my system, in my pajama pants with coffee or a cocktail over greasy listening station headphones.

So all that being said, I'm willing to bet music file sharing is at an all-time low just because of the absurdly low consumer cost of streaming. It's a wild thought to me that these services can only get away with charging $10/mo when considering the way we used to purchase music pre-2008.

 

[ar surround]

So all that being said, I'm willing to bet music file sharing is at an all-time low just because of the absurdly low consumer cost of streaming. It's a wild thought to me that these services can only get away with charging $10/mo when considering the way we used to purchase music pre-2008.

Prices will rise once the streaming services determine that they have their fangs deeply embedded into the world population.

 

[jimfisheye]

...

So all that being said, I'm willing to bet music file sharing is at an all-time low just because of the absurdly low consumer cost of streaming. It's a wild thought to me that these services can only get away with charging $10/mo when considering the way we used to purchase music pre-2008.

Hence creating an encoding system with decoder software only available in a hardware device. ie. Atmos

 

[Sal1950]

Now with albums disappearing from streaming services,

Where to you see albums disappearing?
Except in the cases of artists/labels spoon feeding individual songs from
an upcoming album release, I haven't run into any missing albums for the music
I've gone looking for on Apple?

Anyway, we have a big generation gap in our listening habits.
I never got into the mix-tape or Napster mp3 type of music listening, maybe due to the forced choice
of vinyl in the old days. But still IMHO your shortchanging your appreciation of what
the artist is trying to present to you by only listening to bits and pieces of the parts you the
like most. In the majority of cases I found an appreciation for most if not all of the songs
presented on a album by taking the time to listen beyond the few cuts you heard on the
radio or someones "mix tape". YMMV