Trust Your Ears. Dolby Atmos on Apple Music Doesn’t Sound “Right”

[Doug G.]

From the introduction of Dolby "B", I have thought nothing Dolby has sounded right.

Doug

 

[jimfisheye]

Unlimited access is why I believe this time is different and why it will succeed.

Sure... If they ever release the f-ing codec!
Right now it's a copy protection system pushing planned obsolescence. If they wait too much longer it will be seen as the cheesy "shitbar sound format for movies".

This really is a new level of blind greed. I'm kind of impressed at the effort Apple put in to lock this down. I suppose, make everyone buy a new AVR every 3 or 4 years, right? They could make them connect to any available wi-fi network to download updates that will lock it down to periodically force you to buy a new one. Like they do with the inkjet printers now. You can't turn off the timer on the ink cartridge by unplugging it anymore. It just calls home next time and updates the timer. I said your 99.8% full ink cartridge is empty mfr!

I don't like seeing this kind of shit going on around the arts. Can you greedy pieces of shit leave music alone, please and thank you?

 

[kamranv]

Glad you clarified that it was about creating vs consuming. Your article unfortunately covered issues of creation and consumption, as you stated that no one is listening. (Hint- we are, and we like what we hear, and we typically don't use headphones for Atmos or Dolby audio, unless we have the gear to truly pull it off.)

Speaking of refinements... and crucial timing... it might be time to update or do a follow up to your article!

The Logic update just dropped that allows for A/B comparisons between Dolby Atmos and Apple Spatial Audio (Binaural). This should fix some of the differences for sure. I'm hopeful this will allow creators to dial it in as close as possible.

So your primary complaint was just solved via technology, and it hasn't even been out for a year. Looks like the toddler just made the track team. Hopefully Pro Tools will get the same treatment soon, but now there is at least one solution to easily mix for Atmos - binaural or discreet.

Agreed- the numbers you are stating were from July 2021, with the service growing at that time 4-5 million subscribers per month, conservatively.

No one has Apple's actual numbers for subscribers, but the assumption is it's well north of 100 million. That is nothing to scoff at. Which means that even if there are only 1% listening on Atmos with speakers, that's likely over a million listeners. That is a market. Historically, a million SACDS or DVD-A's sold would have been a massive mainstream success!

The difference this time is the cost barriers to entry are much lower. SACD was not a sub $1000 endeavor. Apple TV is. The Atmos system in the living room or den is now a music system as well. That means if it sounds decent, people will listen. Atmos music is just another way to use your investment in Atmos gear, so everyone here absolutely uses it for music! I might argue daily! I feel no compromises in my playback other than I wish the Atmos streaming quality was truly lossless.

A key point I'm making is most of us here at QQ consume Atmos music using multichannel audio using speakers vs spatial processing.

Stating Atmos is somehow a compomise because it started for movies makes little sense. A good mix creates a sense of immersion for movies or music. Some are enhancements to previous multichannel mixes, and some are something new. Sometimes they are good and sometimes they aren't. The same with movies. Atmos mixing is like any other mixing- some mixes are good, some are bad. It's still VERY new to music engineers! Having the differences compared by the engineer should improve mixing for spatial (headphones), but that won't fix someone who doesn't know what they are doing. That said, the more bedroom studios that can deliver content, the more content will be available, the more experience people get mixing, the better the content....

The greater the chance multichannel succeeds this time.

The number of available tracks in Apple Music well exceeds all the dvd-a, sacd, and blu ray music content I own already. Each week we get more. Sometimes it's old OOP quad recordings or new Atmos mixes from new or popular artists. The point is the content is growing at a steady and decent pace. In a few years, we should have most of the multichannel back catalogs available via streaming, along with hundreds of new albums.

All of this is available to everyone at the click of a button. No chasing OOP titles on eBay, scouring estate sales, camping on discogs, etc. It's all there, waiting to be explored. Artists and genres you would not typically buy are available to you at no additional cost, to explore as well.

Unlimited access is why I believe this time is different and why it will succeed. Fixing spatial mixes is just growing pains, which now looks like it has a solution.

The logic update is an important step forward. Thank you for sharing.

Someone even already did a really nice video on this new and important feature. The video does a good job of A/Bing the sonic difference between Dolby Binaural Renderer vs the Apple Spatial Renderer; worth a listen. It's also worth noting the equipment requirements Apple has for this feature.
Maybe @jimfisheye is on to something?

Now the difficult decision to work exclusively in Logic Pro (and do these equipment+OS upgrades).

Does this mean Apple won't make future modifications to its renderer to sound more like Dolby?
Should Dolby modify their renderer instead?
Or maybe since Apple is the only thing that matters, ignore the Dobly Binaural Renderer all together?
...time will tell.

Thank you all for the excellent research and excellent opinions. This conversation helps everyone.

 

[Franck]

Meanwhile Dolby is working on PHRTF. I’m going to see if that improves my binaural experience or not. I hope this find its way into the Apple Renderer, because that with dynamic head tracking would bring everyone a better binaural experience

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/pr...-dolby-atmos-personalized-rendering-announced

 

[Franck]

Meanwhile Dolby is working on PHRTF. I’m going to see if that improves my binaural experience or not. I hope this find its way into the Apple Renderer, because that with dynamic head tracking would bring everyone a better binaural experience

I just tried it on a track of mine in the Dolby Renderer and it does improve my binaural experience. Now your move Apple!

 

[LuvMyQuad]

If they wait too much longer it will be seen as the cheesy "shitbar sound format for movies".

Hmmmm..... SSFM, another acronym to be aware of.

I learned one last night while watching The Thing About Pam mini series.... SODDI (pronounced Soddy). Some Other Dude Did It

 

[pat bateman]

Good article, I enjoyed it!

I agree about the .10 % of people enjoying surround sound music. For the last 8 years, my profession has been outside sales. I visit 2-3 homes per day. 261 working days in 1 year X 2.5 clients per day X 8 years = approximately 5220 homes I have visited. My line of work makes it necessary for me to go into every room of the house. Over that time, I have seen 2 clients with listening rooms, and about 10 with dedicated home theaters. I enjoy talking about this stuff, so I always poke around to see how serious they are about it, and of those 12 people, 10 of them were just well-off financially people who just like to enjoy movies to the fullest with the family. 1/2 remaining had a very nice 2 channel setup with 30K Martin Logan electrostatics, and the other one inherited the house with the listening room included and didn't care much about it. We have a niche hobby! Even my brother, who I thought I could reel into this hobby, really enjoys binaural headphone stuff doesn't really "get" multi-channel music and the appeal.

Regarding headphone Atmos - I tend to prefer the "Atmos" headphone mix about 25% of the time. Sometimes they're so similar its too close to call. It's strange.

What would be an interesting experiment, is if someone has an android phone with a Tidal sub and an iPhone with an Apple Music sub, and did a blind test to see if what Apple is doing (using their own renderer) actually makes a difference. It wouldn't be enough to make me use an android phone daily if the results were noticeably better, but possibly enough to buy some cheap android phone for listening to headphone Atmos. With a new baby, I find my dedicated listening room time has been cut by 90+% for now.

 

[kamranv]

@pat bateman this is really interesting and helpful firsthand research. Thank you for it.

Maybe with the continued advance of low latency wireless tech, we will see more speaker installations? Even then, would it still be 5.1 or maybe 5.1.2 (with the .2 being a soundbar with speakers pointed to the ceiling? I'm curious what if anything that you're seeing with these kind of installations with sound bars plus some satellites and how these really translate. Maybe some other folks on here have some opinions and experience here too? Aren't there soundbars that claim 7.1.4 somehow with just the soundbar?

Switching gears back to headphones, I’d also love to opinions comparing Apple Spatial to Tidal (AC4-IMS). I understand Apple is constantly tweaking their technique, so maybe it's too much of a moving target to bother? Technically AC4-IMS is supposed be the same as what we hear in the studio via the Dolby Atmos renderer since it utilizes the metadata nested in the ADM file but there seems to be some debate there too.

There are a lot of different Binaural renderers nested in producer and engineer workflows. The Dolby one being the most "trusted" and Apple being the most "real world" but Sony 360ra, DearVR, Nuendo, and Envelope are all very much in use. Do we have a new format war brewing?

I'd love your opinions. This sounds all too familiar to the multiple quad formats that were around in the 70s, eh?

 

[wrat]

Have not read article , dont own headphones nor do I use apple music, HOWEVER I do listen to atmos and I have a friend who has a pretty nice rig loves surround music and is very into the apple ECO SYSYTEM Iphones Ipads apple TV etc and I asked him about the atmos apple music thing and was told he does not like it so?

 

[depeche76]

So, what is the best streaming service for surround (dolby atmos)? Apple or Tidal? Or even Amazon Music could be?

 

[pat bateman]

So, what is the best streaming service for surround (dolby atmos)? Apple or Tidal? Or even Amazon Music could be?

Both manipulate the source material which is annoying. I know this because if you were to “acquire” both unaltered tidal streams and Apple Music streams and pass them through directly to your AVR, they sound completely different in a good way. The biggest complaint with Tidal is low volume, so you’ll find yourself really having to crank the volume up.

 

[Sal1950]

Both manipulate the source material which is annoying. I know this because if you were to “acquire” both unaltered tidal streams and Apple Music streams and pass them through directly to your AVR, they sound completely different in a good way. The biggest complaint with Tidal is low volume, so you’ll find yourself really having to crank the volume up.

I think your either hearing things or imagining a conspiracy.
You say you know this, please present the evidence ?
Minimally do you have some recorded Audicity plots of the different "manipulated" streamers?
For the most part the labels dictate whats going out where depending on the signed licenses the streamers have made.

So, what is the best streaming service for surround (dolby atmos)? Apple or Tidal? Or even Amazon Music could be?

I've been thru them all a couple times with the exception of Tidal, I refuse to do business with that company for a couple reasons, today it's mainly their continued support of the consumer ripoff/con called MQA.
I find Apple has the best catalog of music, specially Atoms and multich.
Sadly they have the worst user interface in the industry.
And one day I just might smash my Apple 4k Remote with a hammer. LOL

 

[LuvMyQuad]

Both manipulate the source material which is annoying. I know this because if you were to “acquire” both unaltered tidal streams and Apple Music streams and pass them through directly to your AVR, they sound completely different in a good way. The biggest complaint with Tidal is low volume, so you’ll find yourself really having to crank the volume up.

Are you claiming the unaltered streams from Apple and Tidal would sound different from each other
or
that the unaltered streams would sound different from the processed streams?

 

[pat bateman]

I think your either hearing things or imagining a conspiracy.
You say you know this, please present the evidence ?
Minimally do you have some recorded Audicity graphs of the different "manipulated" streamers?
For the most part the labels dictate whats going out where depending on the signed licenses the streamers have made.

The evidence is anecdotal, but its such a black and white difference that the effort required to audio capture from an Apple TV to compare to an unaltered Tidal MP4 via Audacity, isn’t worth it (in my opinion - kudos to anyone else who puts in the effort). Tidal puts up to a -14 dialnorm offset and the dynamic range suffers greatly.

I can’t talk about it too much on here since going into more detail gets into piracy territory, but I will say this. If you have an unaltered MP4 from Tidal, or a recorded 5.1 stream from Apple Music, and you pass through those files to your AVR via Kodi or whatever, the sound is vastly different than listening via the official apps. Apple is not nearly as bad as Tidal however. Tidal absolutely murders the dynamic range for reasons I cannot understand.

You can read more anecdotal evidence of this happening here -

 

[pat bateman]

Are you claiming the unaltered streams from Apple and Tidal would sound different from each other
or
that the unaltered streams would sound different from the processed streams?

The latter. The former, I have not compared, but would be easy. I’ll do some Audacity comparisons later this evening.

 

[sjcorne]

Whatever processing they use to fit 12 discrete channels into an Apple Music stream does generate audible artifacts, if you solo the height or surround back channels on some material you can hear MP3-like 'metallic' degradation on vocals and other instruments. Those channels are not consistently active on many of the better streaming-only Atmos mixes (Tom Petty, Doors, Olivia Rodrigo, etc), which makes me think it's a known issue and the remix engineers are advised to use those positions sparingly. That said, it's not so noticeable if you listen to all speakers playing at the same time as intended.

 

[Sal1950]

You can read more anecdotal evidence of this happening here -

If Tidal is normalizing that doesn't affect the DR or anything else about the files sound quality. Replay gain is also a very effective system to make sure from one track to the next the volume remains somewhat level. You can easily test for yourself by first taking a half dozen tracks from different CDs and running them thru DR measure software. Then use Replay Gain software to set the offset number to the file and then remeasure the files DR again, it won't change.

 

[LuvMyQuad]

The latter. The former, I have not compared, but would be easy. I’ll do some Audacity comparisons later this evening.

In that case, I agree.

Whatever processing they use to fit 12 discrete channels into an Apple Music stream does generate audible artifacts, if you solo the height or surround back channels on some material you can hear MP3-like 'metallic' degradation on vocals and other instruments. Those channels are not consistently active on many of the better streaming-only Atmos mixes (Tom Petty, Doors, Olivia Rodrigo, etc), which makes me think it's a known issue and the remix engineers are advised to use those positions sparingly. That said, it's not so noticeable if you listen to all speakers playing at the same time as intended.

I agree with this too. I compared a few tracks from the handfull of Atmos disks I have vs the Apple streamed counterparts on my 5.1.4 setup. There is a distinct loss in fidelity with the Apple streams, and I didn't think it was just limited to the heights. Sometimes its pretty subtle, depending on the track, but its unmistakably always there. To be fair, without switching between the disc and the stream, I don't think i would have noticed it so easily.

 

[Sal1950]

To be fair, without switching between the disc and the stream, I don't think i would have noticed it so easily.

Without making sure the level is equal to within 0.25db on the 2 files, and having the ablity to rapidly switch between them, it is likely to hear all sort of SQ differences in the files.

 

[LuvMyQuad]

Without making sure the level is equal to within 0.25db on the 2 files, and having the ablity to rapidly switch between them, it is likely to hear all sort of SQ differences in the files.

Yeah I know the routine. I cant meet either criteria to the full extent. For the record, I've never had a processor or preamp that did .25dB gain increments. I set levels as best I could by ear followed with verification with the SPL meter in REW. Rapidly switching across HDMI ports is an issue that I couldn't solve. I still stand by what i said. There is a noticeable difference in sound quality. I call it grain or sheen. @sjcorne calls it metallic.