The first time I ever really noticed it, I was on a bus home from work and listening to music on my AirPod Pros with noice cancelation turned on. The music sounded uncannily like it was coming from my phone. When I turned my head, it was still coming from the same place. I had to convince myself that I didn't have my phone speakers up loud to be That Guy on the bus, but it was still loud and clear when I covered my ears with my hands.

The illusion was perfect. It was weird and awesome, and I love it.

This is Spatial Audio, but it’s not the kind talked about here. These Spatial Audio mixes have that effect but distinct locations for every instrument/voice/audio line, so it doesn’t sound like it’s coming from your device, but that it is all around you.

More precisely, Spatial Audio renders sound into your ears that simulates placement of sound sources in a real 3-D space. It can take a stereo mix and render it as if it were coming from speakers in your device. It can also take a surround or Dolby Atmos mix and render it as if you were in the center of the speaker array (surround) or the center of a room with multiple signal sources (Atmos). It can do this with head tracking that makes the simulation truly uncanny.

So the branding is a little confusing — Spatial Audio is a technology that sits between your ears and the encoded mix, as well as a marketing label to differentiate Atmos mixes from stereo mixes in the store.

Sure. Maybe more accurately, it sounded like it was coming from a stage roughly where my phone was.

Why do you want the music to sound like it is coming from your phone while you are on a bus? FWIW, my phone, when I am on a bus, is in some random location as I move it between hands, put it in my pocket or attempt to prop it on a ledge, and I'm probably often staring blankly out the window... am I somehow crazy? Why does the iPhone keep wanting me to think the audio is coming from my phone?

It's eerily good with the Apple TV.

I often watch movies with AirPods Max in the living room. Multiple times I've had to take off the headphones to make sure I'm not accidentally blasting whatever I'm watching through the home theater setup instead.

With "normal" headphones the sound follows your head, so if you glance to the side to see where your snacks are, the voice turns. With spatial audio the voice still sounds like it's coming from where the TV is. (Or iPad or iPhone)

Worth noting that it recalibrates the “origin” to be in front of you if you keep looking in the same direction for a while.

This sounds like a cool engineering project in search of a reason to exist. The fact that they're trying "encourage" artists to encode with this does not diminish this impression.

The reason it exists is because of the products they haven't released yet. Spatial audio is part of the AR experience they want to release in the future, and it just so happens they can release it before that is ubiquitous so now they have a testbed for it with existing devices.

I enjoy it. Mono is fine for getting music to our ears, but then we invented stereo. Stereo is fine for getting music to our ears, but then we invented spatial audio. Neither stereo nor spatial are required to hear and enjoy music. However, I vastly prefer stereo to mono, and I can imagine a near future where I'd prefer spatial to both.

It sounded gimmicky to me until I experienced it. Now I get why Apple (and others!) are pushing it.

I really dislike Spatial Audio mixes for music, it does not make sense, I don't want the sounds coming from every direction, music is never experienced like that in reality.

Talking to some musician friends about it and they also do not like the experience, from either side: not as a listener nor as a musician.

It's a cool gimmick for some art projects, but for general listening it has no improvements over stereo while making the process of mixing much more complicated.

Besides what the other commenter said (Apple adds support for things like this with a long lead in front of the use-cases they really intend it for), everyone I've talked about it with loves spatial audio. There really is something compelling about music that sounds like it comes around you in the environment rather than just from inside your head.

I suspect there is some effect where people are primed to have positive impressions of things they spent a lot of money on. Not to say no one would have enjoyed it in a blind test. But I think some fraction will be predisposed to enjoy it to justify their decision. I've heard plenty of first hand accounts from people that didn't like it also. Benn Jordan's video on the subject is the most comprehensive treatment I've seen.

I like cool demos as much as the next guy, but maybe I just don't get it — why is this a feature and why would I want this?

Its one of those things that you might not go out of your way to get, but once you have it, its pretty nice. Not game changing by any means, but it adds a bit of immersion.

Also, think of it as not an intentionally developed feature for the current gen of devices, but rather the "next gen" of AR glasses and such. I don't think apple went out of their way to build it as a selling feature today, but as a consequence of building it for their AR vision of the future, they can release and test it today.

I don't know, it really confused me during a train ride as well, because I thought my phone was playing out load, and not through my airpods.

This is not the effect that "Spatial Audio" in Apple Music is referring to. It is indeed super weird... every time for me. Not bad just like "wait... is this playing in my ears?". This happens with iPad and AppleTV.

What the article is referring to is more like music recorded in Atmos (not actually Atmos??, but same idea). You can hear where instruments or vocals, or whatever are coming from in relation to each other (or technically whatever position they want you to hear them at).

It's weird and awesome, and I _hate_ it. Precisely because of the "argh, I'm the person listening to something out loud on the bus" thing. Can't get past it.

Who is asking for spatial audio mixes? Is there any demand for this or is Apple pushing it for corporate reasons? To my ears, the spatial mixes are an interesting gimmick, but the audio quality sounds worse than the "HD" (or whatever they are called) mixes. Personally, I'm just happy with CD quality streams - I'm not able to hear differences with anything higher quality than that, but I can often (but not always) tell the difference with lower quality streams.

I imagine it's seen as a value-add by Apple and Dolby. Studios are forking off massive sums to build-out Atmos rigs. A savvy artists may ask for it because it helps you on Apple Music.

As for the consumer experience, I feel like Benn Jordan's video from earlier last year does a good job of explaining the situation and its current limitations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Dw3aKbw5Wo

Yes - I saw that video! Reaffirms my belief that it's really just Apple pushing this.

I also find it really annoying as it keeps wanting to push me into a mode where it is doing "head tracking" with "spatial audio" based on the location of my phone, as if the location of my phone has any meaning at all to me when I am listening to music (or even "watching" video as I am likely trying to do some activity at the same time or why the hell am I using my phone?!).

Agreed, i've only ever turned it off, why would I want L and R to swap when I turn around? maybe if it was realtime i wouldn't notice it but with airpods at least there's a noticeable delay in the mix catching up to your movement

It's not meant for situations where you spin around constantly, but it works really well when you're sitting down.

Head tracking can be disabled along with spatial audio enabled. Spatial audio is a theoretically great feature even in now with proper mastering, but I think head tracking is an optional feature that's prepared for AR.

My take is that Apple’s prepping to have some chock-full content streams for when the Vision Pro or its successors become more mainstream, so that Spatial Audio can become part of the draw for using those devices.

I also suspect this is a big part of the reason they developed Spatial Audio in the first place.

Can we instead have a 'mixed for good audio equipment' option? It doesn't matter how many PCM samples you have if the mixing engineer expects me to play it on a potato.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oq_Ol3kX1k

I have noticed this as well. EDM/Dance/Pop is a particular offender, we've lost a lot of ground since BT's "Emotional Technology". In the between-years, getting CD quality / FLAC formats helped a lot, but as you say, now the original masters are pretty highly compressed and don't get much benefit from quality audio systems at reasonable volume levels.

I'd like a "mixed for people who can hear both loud and quiet sounds" version, please. My go-to example for terrible mastering is Dropkick Murphys' "The Meanest of Times" album. "The State of Massachusetts" starts with some mandolin (I think?) picking, then launches into drums and distorted guitars at exactly the same volume. I loaded the song in a sample editor and its waveform at 100% loudness the whole time. The album's songs are great, but I can't bear to listen to it.

It's at the point where people regularly record the vinyl LPs of an album and post those online because the mastering constraints of vinyl force these lunatic mixers (or their corporate bosses) to stay within the realms of sanity.

Otherwise it's just early 2000s loudness wars all over again.

Isn't that gimmick rock bands use to get you to dial the volume up to 11? AC/DC is the only band I know that doesn't do that.

It’s so you can hear all of the song when it’s played in public at a volume quiet enough to have a conversation over. Should be reserved for the radio edit IMO.

I spent some time listening to some Spatial Audio mixes about 1 year ago. Dolby Atmos is a cool concept but I was not able to hear a benefit.

This reminds me of how when stereo first came out artists (including the Beatles) didn’t take it seriously. They would spend most of their time getting the mono mix right and the the stereo mix was thrown together and would often do strange things like having the lead vocals on one side.

Does anyone know of artists that have really taken the time to ensure their music is benefitting from Dolby Atmos?

It's a gimmick that doesn't really add much to music. Most professional audio engineers I've spoken to about it absolutely hate mixing for it.

It can be a pain in the ass to make and worthwhile.

It adds to the music when done well.

Do the same engineers hate doing compressed crap where the waveform looks like this: ========== too?

At least all of the Atmos mixes I've listened have some dynamic range in it.

Peter Gabriel's 2023 album "i/o" has some quite inspired Atmos mixing going on. The track "The Court" is particularly nice. Make sure you pick the "In-Side Mix" version of the album.

Nice Atmos tracks by other artists imho:

- Jaguar by Victoria Monét

- get well soon by Ariana Grande

- Heroes (feat. Mindy Jones) by Moby, Album "Reprise"

The i/o album really blew up the usability of Apple Music. Three mixes per song, one of which (in-side) is an Atmos mix, unless you don’t have Spatial Audio active, when you silently get one of the other two. And they released it one song at a time throughout the year, so it was just a bag of unrelated singles. At the end of the year, the album came out with duplicate tracks for the two stereo mixes, and I don’t even know for sure how to get the in-side mix.

In general, the situation with Spatial Audio mixes is confusing, and it is really annoying for back catalog tracks where instead of the established (sometimes iconic) stereo version you silently get an Atmos version that the label commissioned without input from the original artist/producer/engineer.

Thanks for the tips!

Listening to The Court right now and the soundscape is really well done.

I just love it. It adds more depth to everything even podcasts. I can’t listen to music without it, it’s so well executed that music without it appears flat to me. 100x better difference than lossless music.

Huh, what podcasts (and podcast apps) support spatial audio? Or can you somehow emulate it with any regular stereo audio now?

“Spatialize Stereo” is an option in iOS if you have airpods. (long press on volume meter, same place where you can switch between transparency and noise canceling)

Exactly and all sources will benefit from a Spatial Audio effect which is really nice

I don't really care about it at all for music, but I want it to get popular enough that it finally actually happens in games, which for some reason still pretty much entirely lack binaural audio.

It definitely made hearing acoustic music / music with real instruments a hell of a lot better for me, making it closer to being at a performance than listening to headphones.

It seems to depend. Some tracks seem to really benefit - I was listening to some Bob Marley and thought it was particularly good.

I do not know if they are on streaming platforms, but Imogen Heap has some atmos mixes and they are worth experiencing. She also does spatial in her live shows. The recording is only stereo, but you can see her do it in act 3 of her tiny desk concert.

For the majority of music in my personal listening I've found stereo to be better, but I recall the recent Blink 182 album One More Time... and Hans Zimmer's Dune Sketchbook to sound nice in Atmos.

I did try spatial audio. I have compatible Airpods (Max) and also it will play through my home theater system from my Apple TV.

But after about a month I turned it off. All the stereo mixes sound better. It some cases, a lot better. I don't want music swirling around my head every time I look left or right.

Sorry Apple. Sorry artists. Stereo has endured this long for a reason. We have two ears.

...it's not "swirling around your head", it's trying to emulate a case where the sound is coming from static speakers that don't move even though your head does.

Yes. I understand what it's doing. But it sounds like "swirling" and it's usually fairly unpleasant.

There are some spatial tracks that are extraordinarily good, and others that seem worse than the stereo version.

Apple Music doesn't let you easily choose spatial vs non-spatial from the Now Playing screen. They have a single on/off toggle for everything. So it's much easier to simply have Spatial Audio turned off for everything.

It's very interesting to me that Apple's willing to push spatial audio mastering this hard.

Because on the one hand, listening to spatial audio on headphones is fantastic -- I will absolutely never go back to regular stereo-through-headphones playback that sounds like comes from inside your head. Spatial audio feels like it comes from outside your head, and totally eliminates the "headphones fatigue" the inside-your-head sensation creates. And you can literally hear more detail in the music because there's more separation in the instruments.

But on the other hand, it's not super clear that spatial audio recordings are all that necessary for music, because the "Spatialize Stereo" setting works pretty well on its own. You don't need Dolby mastering -- my iPhone spatializes any stereo track already, doing whatever magic processing it does based on the relative volumes and delays of the same frequencies on the L/R channels.

I've tried listening to the same tracks using Apple Music's spatial masters, and in Spotify with the spatialized stereo version. The Apple Music versions feel maybe twice as "wide" with more separation between some instruments (and sounds are usually placed a bit differently). But on the other hand, it's not clear to me that that's actually a good thing. Because when I'm watching movies with my AirPods, I do want sounds from the left to feel like they're coming all the way from the left. But when I'm listening to music on the train or on a bus, too much spatial separation feels like it might be more distracting than desired. Spatialized stereo feels good enough to me -- I don't really see a huge benefit in remastering music in surround say, the way there has been a huge benefit in remastering movie audio from previous decades in surround.

But I guess we'll see. Especially with new speakers like the Sonos Era 300 [1] that are actually built to project spatial audio into a room -- so it's not just something for headphones anymore.

[1] https://www.sonos.com/en-us/shop/era-300

I don't mean to question your experience, but the inside/outside thing can very easily be a property of the headphones, not the mix. Certainly mixing it to emphasize that is a choice, but a good stereo mix is really not so fundamentally limited in its soundstage.

It may be the producer's deliberate choice to have the voice here, the guitar there, etc, and automatic "spatializers" may moot that choice. But of course so may playing it via a single-channel Bluetooth speaker. It's up to the listener to provide the experience they like best, but I question the need to have Apple pushing this particular type of mix so hard.

> the inside/outside thing can very easily be a property of the headphones, not the mix

Not in any of my experience or knowledge. Literally every set of headphones makes it sound like both mono and stereo audio are coming from inside your head, unless the actual mastering is meant to provide an "outside your head" experience.

Originally, the "outside your head" experience only came from binaural recordings, where two microphones were placed inside dummy ears on a dummy head. That led to the famous "virtual barbershop" audio track and similar. The "outside" effect comes from a combination of relative delays* and the head-related transfer function (HRTF) [1] -- how the shape of your head and ear affects the sound waves.

Regular stereo mastering never uses any of these binaural effects, so it always sounds "inside", or "between the ears".

Spatializing stereo, on the other hand, is Apple's (quite successful) attempt to create relative delays and the HRTF. It has nothing to do with the quality or specifications of your headphones, and rather everything to do with the audio signal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function

*To be precisely accurate, I believe the delays are actually included as part of the overall HRTF.

I don't think this is correct. The headphones themselves certainly have an large effect on the size and quality of the soundstage. Obviously encoding binaural delay and other psychoacoustic features is important too. But Apple is far from the first to do this kind of precision stereo manipulation.

> The headphones themselves certainly have an large effect on the size and quality of the soundstage.

They don't, not on its size. I'm not sure what mechanism by which you think they would?

> But Apple is far from the first to do this kind of precision stereo manipulation.

Certainly not -- I never suggested they were.

I don't know what to tell you. I've tested dozens of pairs of headphones and some have a clearly, obviously larger soundstage than others, with the same exact inputs. Others have a more "inside" feel. I think we must simply be talking about different things, because what I'm describing is a commonly cited property in headphone reviews and discussions.

I've tried it before on AirPods Max and wasnt' that impressed. But just yesterday I've tried it on a very nice home cinema. Some songs seem basically auto-generated, but some songs have a very cool surround mix. It's a bit of a gamble right now what you'll get. Either is a fun experience though.

So I think the technology is quite cool and I will use it again. It won't be very often though, because all my regular listening areas/devices are stereo.

I seem to recall AirPods Max don't support Spatial Audio mixes... maybe that's changed?

Using them right now, definitely supported. They don't support lossless, though.

Ah that's what it was.

Oh no please no. Also, probably no use switching elsewhere because everything apple does is contagious.

On apple pods atmos sounds like an allpass filtered mush, with weird coloration and all transients and bass done in.

It is especially apparent when switching between stereo and atmos on the same track - why would I want it? Am I missing something?

At least apple didn't catch the MQA disease (for now. thanks?)

It might even offset a year's worth of inflation.

I just wanted to play my MP3s without dealing the crapton of bugs and UI disasters that is Apple Music.

I tried using Home Sharing yesterday. The iPhone app simply showed a spinner that eventually disappeared. No error messages, nothing. I’m logged in on the same account, same wifi, etc. I tried logging out and in, force quitting, turning off and on home sharing, nothing worked. Annoyed me so much I even lost the joy of listening to the song.

I don’t give a shit about spatial audio. I want basic functionality we had 20 years ago.

"Apple continues to search for the Vision Pro's killer feature."