Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

I've seen a lot of BS marketing stuff with stereo + some effects being labelled as 5.1 or 7.1.

What is Dolby Atmos? I went to https://www.dolby.com/technologies/dolby-atmos/ but it doesn't really tell you. In my dreams it is music recorded with surround channels and then an technology that plays it back through two speakers using an IMU so you can turn your head and hear different stuff. In reality, it's probably a BS effect... somebody, please reply if you actually know. (Not guess, actually know. Futile, I know -- I'm going to get lots of guesses as replies because that's what always happens on HN.)

A long time ago, surround was based on how the wires were hooked up, so first we had 2 channels, then 2.1, 5.1, etc. So your recording might have a left, right, rear channel, but the channels had to be globally defined and premixed. Your audio file would say “play A out of the speaker, B out the right speaker.”

Atmos is redoing that for digital, so you can say that a channel or sound is positioned at a point in space, and your receiver or device figures out which speakers to use to present it. Your audio file says “play A 10’ left of the listener, play B 10’ right of the user.”

How do you deal with the cost? I pay $18/month for Apple Music (Family) and I can listen to thousands of tracks in a single day if I wanted to. That same experience would cost me thousands of dollars up front to kick start it.

This also isn't to mention the fact that not all music is available to buy legally online. Dimmu Borgir, for example, use Nuclear Blast and I struggle to find retailers online that can sell me MP3s outside of iTunes. I don't want to have to deal with (read: rip) CDs and vinyl is a joke at 3x the price (not to mention simply being a dead format.)

So how are you going to curate a library, legally, so that the artist is supported, assuming you have at least 20-30 artists you like.

tongue in cheek answer: nothing. It's your ears that are special.

Less tongue in cheek, while we have got pretty good at making microphones, they don't behave anything like human audio system; this makes it really difficult to reproduce what we experience when generated a different way (e.g. multichannel playback).

There is nothing "special" about classical music here either, it's just got a lot of complexity (from multiple instruments, and room dynamics) and dynamic range.

I see your point: if we could a) design microphones that capture everything going by them in a neutral way and b) design speakers that precisely reproduce everything they are sent in a neutral way, and c) set up a room to reproduce things in a neutral way for your particular position ... then this would work. We can't actually do any of those things.