Dolby Atmos Music
Why Dolby Atmos®?
Dolby Atmos®, a 3D audio format, opens new possibilities for music production. Dolby Atmos music mixes offer an extraordinary listening experience where sound comes not only from the front but from all sides and above. With the introduction of Dolby Atmos music streaming on Apple Music® in 2021, Dolby Atmos mixes were catapulted into the mainstream and made accessible to a broad audience. Since then, demand for immersive productions has steadily increased.
Contact us for a Dolby Atmos listening demo at our studio and be impressed.
The following excerpts from our sound engineer Tim Preis's thesis provide deeper insights:
"3D audio describes the technique of creating the impression of sound sources in a three-dimensional space around listeners. In addition to the horizontal plane, 3D audio must be able to represent the vertical plane, allowing sound sources to be heard from above. In audio production, sound sources can be positioned and moved along three axes in space, making the listening experience more immersive. For the three-dimensional space around listeners to be convincingly reproduced, one of two requirements must be met: In professional speaker playback, a minimum number of speakers must actually be positioned around the listeners; in headphone playback, certain aspects of binaural reproduction, such as the listener's ear spacing, must be considered. Technically, the work involves choosing between channel-based and object-based 3D audio formats, where the differences primarily relate to multi-track audio signal processing. In a channel-based system, individual audio signals are sent to dedicated speakers. The sound engineer defines in advance which signal is distributed to which speaker. This is the established system for two-channel or 5.1 surround formats. The position of individual sound sources follows either the original mapping when using a main microphone system or a calculation of the mapping to the predefined speaker arrangement during mixing. In an object-based system, individual audio signals are defined as objects with metadata such as position and spatial size. The metadata can change over time. This frees the format from fixed listening situations and offers the possibility to process all individual objects separately."
(Tim Preis, Music production for 3D-Audio, Diploma thesis, Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, 2024, p. 7f.)
Playback
marinegrau features a Dolby Atmos® Music certified* control room with a 7.1.4 speaker setup. The configuration includes PMC IB-1S main speakers, a PMC 8-2 SUB subwoofer, and Neumann KH120 surround speakers.
"Dolby Atmos is a 3D audio format and playback technology developed by Dolby Laboratories in 2012. As an object-based format, it isn't bound to discrete speaker channels, offering greater flexibility in production and playback across different spaces. Additionally, higher requirements for surround and overhead speakers ensure enhanced listening quality. According to Dolby Atmos requirements, all speakers – not just those on the lower level – should be full-range speakers and must be volume-adjusted to produce qualitatively equivalent signals across the entire audible frequency range from all directions."
(Preis, 2024. p. 8f.)