Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

For those who have never heard of Ambisonics, it's a surround-sound format based on taking the concept of differential stereo and extending it to three dimensions. Differential stereo is of course where instead of storing/transmitting each channel independently (as on audio cassettes or uncompressed digital audio formats like CDs) you store/transmit a sum of the two channels (L+R) and a difference (L-R) (as on vinyl records or analog FM broadcasts). Monophonic devices can just reproduce the sum channel and ignore the difference channel. Stereophonic devices can recover the two stereo channels through simple signal processing: (L+R) + (L-R) = 2L, (L+R) - (L-R) = 2R.

Ambisonics essentially asks the question of "what if we also stored a front-back and a top-bottom signal?" It turns out this is sufficient to fully represent 3D spatial audio. Additionally, unlike traditional "5.1/7.1"/etc. audio formats which assume a fixed speaker placement, digital signal processing can be used to adapt the audio to any number of speakers in any location in a space or use an HRTF to produce virtualized 3D audio for headphones.

Ambisonics had the misfortune of being invented in the 1970s before digital signal processing made the necessary audio signal processing for making practical use of it cheap and easy to implement, so inferior (but cheaper to implement) formats like Dolby Pro Logic ended up winning in both the consumer and professional spaces. From an open source perspective, though, this makes Ambisonics compelling because all of the important patents related to it should be well past their expiration by this point.

This is Apple and its loyal follower base (their customer base is different) we are talking about. The followers who would have gone week in the knees right after those words.

That Scoopertino post never fails to amuse me.

https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-what-if-apple-m...

Apple is now listed at the "Dolby Atmos Music" page here:

https://www.dolby.com/experience/music/

> This means Apple Music subscribers will be able to hear the exact same thing that the artists created in the studio.

They really meant, "able to hear the exact same recording that the artists created in the studio." They didn't mean, "able to hear the exact same music that the artists created in the studio."

But even this isn't true. Many people can't hear the entire range of a recording, anyway.

I use to be a sound engineer. Those "test" usually with gear they owned and you can of course tell the difference with gear you are use to. Most gear has anything but clarity. Most people will dislike clear sound.

The POINT is blind test 128 MP3 and lossless. Still the vast majority of people don't have the equipment to hear any difference.

The Second POINT is most people prefer to have boomy colored sound and again that ruins the need for lossless. This is why people prefer old vinyl records. It compresses the sound and makes it sound better in most people's opinion. If people would listen to 80s tapes I bet they would love that sound also.

The Third POINT music is heard with background noise all the time. No way while listening to music people could tell the difference and those that can it would require great concentration. There is a limited return of investment for most people.

Personally I own a DAC and a preamp and have my hundreds of dollars headphones and my Genlec speakers that cost thousands of dollars. I hear a SLIGHT difference between 320 MP3 and FLAC and that is 100% concentration and I can hear a difference in only certain types of music. Classical Jazz and Classical music. I can't tell with pop and electronic music which is what most people listen to.