I’ve written my fair share of moans about Dolby technologies over the past year, and while I don’t want to be a negative ninny (look it up) all the time, prepare yourself for another groan.
Well, maybe not so much a moan, but more a pondering on the state of immersive audio in today’s market. If Dolby’s goal was to have its audio technologies in every nook and cranny, then it’s succeeded but I do wonder whether in some circumstances, we get the full expression of what Dolby Atmos Music can do.
What prompted this was a test of the Denon Home 400. By all accounts, this is an impressive wireless speaker, but one area that created some concern was its Dolby Atmos Music performance. I just don’t find it very convincing.
Dolby Atmos Music sounds great… in the right environment
I went to KEF Gallery in central London not too long ago to see the Germany vs Paraguay match in their private cinema (which looked and sounded great, by the way). Before the football started, we were presented with a few demos in Dolby Atmos with music and film. Elton John’s Rocketman got an airing, a track I’ve heard a few times in Dolby Atmos mastering studios, and it sounded blindingly good.
The spaciousness, detail, clarity, but also the positioning of instruments, voices and backing vocals for a track that’s well over 50 years old breathed new life into it. There was music in front, behind, above and to the sides – in terms of producing true immersion, this is Dolby Atmos at its best.
I’ve also heard Dolby Atmos mixes in cars, and cars make for a surprisingly good space to listen to music in. Like a smaller version of a music studio, you have speakers dotted all around you, so you do feel as if music is happening all around you, and you’re in a little bubble of sound.
The key with this is that you have speakers all around you. But when you have a speaker such as the Denon Home 400 or Sonos Era 300, you’re effectively trying to produce an immersive effect from a single source, and I’ve rarely, if ever, found it to be convincing.
Audio processing can do amazing things. With the Sonos Era 300, it can make it seem as if Dolby Atmos tracks sound much taller and wider than the speaker itself; but I also find this to be the case in specific rooms. In some rooms the Atmos effect sounds good, in others I find it slightly harder to hear what’s happening.
Hearing a preview of the Denon Home 400 before it was announced, I had my doubts about how well it could do immersive audio. Without Atmos, it can produce a soundstage that’s much wider and taller than the speaker itself; but throwing an Atmos track in the mix extends the width and height with the in-app controls, and I find Atmos tracks sound thinner and not as natural-sounding as hearing it in a car or a dedicated room.
This is not the fault of the speakers themselves. They’re having to try and do something similar with far few speakers. But this is not the only issue with Dolby Atmos mixes.
Not all Atmos tracks are equal
Part of what makes a good Dolby Atmos Music track is in the mastering. Where an engineer decides to place a certain instrument, position reverb, or vocals can make a track that was originally conceived of in mono or stereo and make it sound effortlessly immersive. There’s an artistry to making a good Dolby Atmos track.
But not all Dolby Atmos tracks could use of the extra information (objects) they have at their disposal.
Maybe they can’t because there simply isn’t much in the original stems of the track to do so. Perhaps it’s a failure of imagination to truly re-conceive a track and the mixer tries to be a little too traditional because they don’t want to stray too far from the source. You get tracks that sound bigger and wider but not much else. I could be listening to the track in stereo, and in some cases, I’d prefer to.
We now have access to a huge trove of immersive audio through the likes of Apple Music, Amazon Music and Tidal; though it’s interesting to note that not every music streaming system offers spatial audio. Deezer dropped Sony’s 360 Reality Audio in 2022. Qobuz is resolutely stereo, Spotify has never seemed too interested in it.
Spatial audio is a mixed bag of quality, with some tracks great and others middling. When everything sounds just so in stereo, immersive audio needs a better hit rate.
Maybe the focus should be elsewhere
I’m not advocating that immersive audio should disappear from every music library, but more so that it has its place, and that place is in environments that can truly do justice to it. Dolby’s march to put Atmos everywhere has led to compromises, and compromise is a thorn in the side of good quality.
Even middling Atmos tracks will sound good in the right environment, even if they don’t make the most of it, they’ve still been mixed in an immersive space to take advantage of what that environment offers. It’s when you scale it down to a wireless speaker that it becomes less impressive and more obviously compromised.
But perhaps, at least when it comes to standalone wireless speakers, the focus should be elsewhere. The Denon Home 400 is clever in that you can extend the width and height of tracks to create a bigger sound with stereo tracks, and the Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speaker also does the same, eschewing immersive audio to widen and make taller, stereo music.
So the Home 400 or Sonos Era 300 can keep their Atmos support as a key feature, but it’s best served within a Dolby Atmos system. On their own, maybe wireless speakers such as these should go for a compromised spatial audio performance, and instead take stereo or mono tracks and create an even bigger and more convincing soundstage, which in itself can be just as immersive.
