Benn Jordan
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2023–2024
24:13 · 889K views · Jun 5, 2023
Musician and audio engineer Benn Jordan tries Dolby Atmos as a consumer, covering the theory of immersive audio, its business model, and home theater and headphone listening. He concludes it often falls short of the pitch.
HN points to it in Atmos and spatial audio threads as a knowledgeable critique of why the format rarely delivers.
5 comments from Hacker News
Someone else posted this down in the bottom of a comment thread somewhere, but I think it deserves to be at the top level: this video This is a smart, motivated audio engineer talking about Atmos. Quick summary: it's awful when it works perfectly, and it almost never works perfectly, in fact, it rarely works at all. Good luck trying to get Atmos working, and even if this was a completely open standard, would you really bother?
You can get very cheap digital to digital audio hardware that can convert any multi-channel audio stream (DRM or otherwise) to straight multi-channel PCM. I personally, occasionally, use an RME Babyface Pro (not cheap) for this purpose, but there are many options available. You can even do this purely in software. On Windows or Linux look at Jack. On MacOS I guarantee it's available. As an aside, Atmos is generally lossy. It's actually a terrible format for music distribution. It's only popular due to marketing. Interesting video from Benn Jordan at this video
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: this video
I found this video by Benn Jordan very enlightening about the whole Atmos nonsense: "Gaslighting Your Fans w/ Dolby ATMOS" this video TL;DW: It's just not worth it. (but do watch it to understand why)
[LINK] tl;dr New surround tech with added height channels. Great. I can imagine there could be uses. Like any new tech before you've analysed it, could be good, could be trash. Additional surround height channels cannot possibly be as good as 2 channels, properly recorded and mixed to drive stereo headphones for generating 3D sound. This is key. You can't beat headphones for 3D sound. If you can't understand why then the conclusions which follow will seem even more incomprehensible, grandparents involvement or no. Best way to meet that impasse head on is to go get your headphones and find some older 3D audio and listen to its quality. Or make some, like I did in the 1980s. It's really great stuff, good fun and can be used creatively and with elegance. I don't doubt for a second Eno could do something worthwhile with it. And could have in the 1980s on the 2 tracks of an LP while instructing the listener to use headphones had he so chosen. Adding height channels to surround cannot make better 3d audio than you could achieve with headphones. So I'm putting Eno down because this is a marketing claim that is garbage. He could have done top notch, first rate, headphone 3D sound on his albums at any time in the past, did he even try? Has he said? He's releasing stuff using $some_new_tech (atmos) for which you need to buy a bunch of kit and justifying it claiming 3D is wonderful. And it is! And he never needed that new tech to take advantage of it and could very, very easily, right n