In early May, some of in the music press got an advance look at what was coming soon from Apple Music. Apple announced that, following the example of Tidal, Qobuz, and Amazon Music HD, the company would no longer deal in AAC, their improved (but still lossy) MP3 equivalent.
Henceforth, all Apple stereo downloads and streams would be at at least CD resolution; many tracks would be offered in higher resolutions, up to 24/192. Apple estimated that by the end of 2021, 75 million songs would be available at resolutions of 16/44.1 or better.
That’s big news, but the Apple people on the call played it down. The improvement wrought by lossless over AAC is small, they suggested, even difficult to hear. Apple had long claimed AAC was “virtually indistinguishable” from CD resolution, so this was nothing new; they were just being consistent with previously stated positions. And they weren’t wrong: Today’s AAC is far better than ’90s-vintage, low-rate MP3 and not far behind CD in terms of sound quality, as rigorous tests have shown. (Which doesn’t mean the difference is unimportant.)
Apple was playing down the significance of lossless/hi-rez to play up the company’s other big announcement: their embrace of “spatial audio” and Dolby Atmos. The difference in that sound was unmistakable. What’s more, Apple would be doing all this for the same $9.95/month they’d been charging all along for just AAC.
Soon after the Apple announcement, Amazon Music HD made its own announcement: It would offer its lossless service at a cost that matched Apple’s. Spotify had already announced, in February, that it would be going lossless soon, but as I write this, there has been no further announcement.
As I wrote in the August issue’s Industry Update, in one obvious way this is reason for celebration. After 25 years of corrupting music, the music industry, and the aural tastes of young people, MP3-style lossy compression is dead and gone. Good riddance.
So, what is Atmos? Home-theater folks already know; this is for everyone else: It’s a surround-sound format created for cinema and adapted for home cinema, video games, and music. It’s also rolling out for car audio.
Dolby Atmos can encode up to 128 channels, and it allows for limitless configurations of up to 34 speakers—5.1 or 7.1.4 or whatever—or even headphones. Atmos adds optional height channels—that’s the number after the second decimal point—to old-fashioned surround sound.
Apart from the height channels, what makes Dolby Atmos (and similar technologies, ’cause there are a few) different from old-school surround is that in Atmos each channel can be assigned either to a specific speaker or to a virtual object in 3D space, an object that has a location and can move around. In a well-implemented Dolby Atmos system, sounds associated with that object seem to be coming from the object’s assigned position.
Dolby Atmos is a very visual sound technology, with an intense focus on spatial effects. As such, it’s likely to find its biggest fans in imaging aficionados. But audiophiles are a diverse group: Some care little about music’s spatial aspects and instead seek rich, lifelike tone and texture and other virtues. (I want imaging and tone.) Atmos elevates the spatial aspect of recorded music over music’s other aspects. There’s much that could go wrong—or right.
I’ve now listened to a few hours of Apple Music’s Dolby Atmos, but only on the AirPods Max Apple sent me—so, Bluetooth (footnote 1)—and my Sennheiser HD 650 headphones via my laptop’s headphone jack (footnotes 2 & 3). It’s true that no perceptive listener could confuse Atmos with stereo in a direct comparison. Listening through headphones, I found that Atmos put more space between instruments, so I could hear each instrument more clearly and the presentation was more relaxed. On many tracks, though, the perspective seemed unnatural: What’s that tuba doing on my ceiling? Sometimes on rock songs, the lead vocals were pushed out to the side as if they were just another instrument and rendered quieter and thinner. It’s not so different from my early experiences of surround sound or from many early stereo experiments: gimmicks substitute for “sound” production.
That may be a consequence of automated Dolby Atmos production: You’d have to hire a lot of engineers to render into Dolby Atmos as many music tracks as Apple has done without some sort of automated process. I’m confident we can expect better as artists and engineers get more involved.
Prominent music writers have criticized Apple’s Atmos demo of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” but I enjoyed it. And yet, it would be a travesty if the Atmos version were the only version of this classic track easily available. That, to me, is the key point about Apple Music and Dolby Atmos: It’s cool as far as it goes, but the original version must stay in circulation, in pristine form.
Apple Music’s embrace of Dolby Atmos offers listeners an interesting alternative to traditional stereo. It also offers hope for long-suffering multichannel music fans: Kal Rubinson will render his verdict as soon as he’s had a good listen. But, for the existing music catalog, this alternative perspective must remain just that: alternative. Regardless of what Apple says, the company’s big news isn’t Atmos but going lossless and hi-rez. New is good, but the vast historical archive of recorded music must be respected.
Footnote 1: Bluetooth, of course, is lossy—which raises another point: Is Apple Music’s Dolby Atmos intrinsically lossless or lossy? The most recent documentation I could find suggests that it’s encoded via Dolby Digital Plus, which is lossy.
Footnote 2: I also tried with the Sennheisers and the AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt DAC/headphone amplifier, but of course, the DragonFly doesn’t decode Atmos.
Footnote 3: I’ve also heard Atmos at Dolby HQ here in NYC and at Audio Engineering Society meetings.
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