Apple Music x Dolby Atmos: Revolutionary? Or Revolting?

Last Month, Apple announced they were bringing Lossless audio and Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos to Apple Music at no extra cost. They even called it their “biggest advancement ever in sound quality” and boy was I excited. You see, for the last couple years I have sort of become obsessed with multi-channel music, collecting the somewhat limited releases from various artists over the years that were mixed in 5.1 surround audio (or in some cases 4.0 quad). You haven't heard Pink Floyd's "Money" until you hear it in surround and have the opening sound effects literally swirl around your head. So needless to say that when Apple announced this feature I was incredibly excited, especially by the notion that these Dolby Atmos tracks could be played back over headphones to create an immersive music experience. As Apple themselves put it, “Apple Music as we know it is about to change forever.”

Cut to June of 2021, and Apple announces at their annual Worldwide Developer Conference Keynote that Spatial Audio was officially launching and we'd start to see it rolling out across the platform that day. I couldn't be more excited! I grabbed my AirPods, popped them in and booted up Apple's Made For Spatial Audio Playlist. The playlist starts with an introduction from Zane Lowe that shows the evolution of Mono up to Dolby Atmos using the Marvin Gaye classic "What's Going On". Lowe describes how Mono was the way music sounded until the mid 60s, and that it feels kind of flat. Then the sound opens up to Stereo and you begin to feel a separation between instruments, and everything feels more open and alive. Then it happened, the big moment. The switch to Atmos. A musical revolution. It sounded...

Awful...

I was genuinely taken aback. You could literally hear the clarity disappear; the vocal went from crisp and clear to dull, flat, and murky. Instruments seemed to disappear into the mix. And where was all this space that Lowe was describing? Everything still sounded like it was in stereo, but just more muddy and buried.

But okay, this is a song from 1971, and perhaps isn't the best way to experience audio technology from 2021. Even if it was actually remixed for Dolby Atmos (and not just run some filters) the fact is it was never designed for the format (incidentally, there is an actual multichannel remix that was released on a SACD in the early 2000s, but I have no idea if this mix was used for the Atmos ).

But the latest Coldplay single was apparently also mixed in Atmos, so I figured I'd check that out. After all, the song was actually from this year, and Coldplay had experimented with recording their previous album in Dolby Atmos, so they weren't strangers to the format (interestingly enough, that album is not available in Atmos on Apple Music yet Edit: Turns out the album is in Atmos on Apple Music; the first track is Lossless only but the rest are in Atmos. I wasn't seeing them as such because I had non-Atmos versions downloaded from when the album was first released. Just one of the many weird/confusing elements of how Apple Music is rolling this out). Sadly, I was almost instantly unimpressed. Everything just seemed quieter (which, I guess in the age of brickwall mastering isn't exactly a bad thing). Thankfully Apple gives you a switch in settings to disable Atmos so I thought I'd do some A/B testing and across the board with every track I was listening to it seemed like the Atmos mix was just a lot quieter, muddier, and murkier.

I continued to work my way through the playlist, but across the board I was not experiencing anything close to surround sound over headphones. This so called "spatial audio" didn't feel any more spacious than the stereo mixes I was used to listening to.

But was it even possible for Apple to do what they claimed? Was surround sound really possible from just two-channel headphones? The answer is, sort of?

I remembered back in high school the web series Diggnation had an episode mixed in Dolby Headphone (a sort of precursor to this Atmos technology) that featured an incredible audio illusion of a matchbox being shaken that literally seemed to move around your entire head. Pop in some headphones and try it out for yourself, it's genuinely uncanny and feels like someone is really in the room moving around you. Now, obviously this is a gimmick, but it proves that the illusion of surround is possible over headphones.

So why was Apple's Spatial Audio letting me down so much? Was it because I was just listening with standard AirPods and not their fancier high-end AirPod Pros/Max? Well, no, Apple claims I shouldn't need to. Was it just the way the tracks were mixed? I genuinely didn't know.

So I took to the Apple Music Reddit forum to see what others were saying. Sounds like I wasn't alone in my assessments. While some raved about the format, others felt very much like me and were incredibly let down by the experience. However while there I saw a post that mentioned that Apple TV is actually sending out Dolby Atmos to Atmos capable soundbars. While I didn't have an Atmos soundbar, I did have a 5.1 setup and so I was curious to see what would happen if I played back these files through my AppleTV. I booted it up, navigated to the Spatial Audio playlist and hit play.

What I heard left me elated. Music started to fill the rear speakers; I was getting actual surround music from a streaming service. I quickly hopped over to play The Beatles "Abbey Road", which I knew already had a Dolby Atmos mix released back in 2019 (produced by Giles Martin no less), and is one of the albums I actually own the multichannel version of. Sure enough, it played back in glorious surround. Unfortunately, since I don't own an actual Atmos system I can't A/B test the blu-ray version with the Apple Music version, but I imagine Apple is simply re-using the Atmos mix from said blu-ray (perhaps just with a bit more compression).

This is the real story here; not "spatial audio over headphones" but true surround sound music when played with a proper setup. I was especially excited to discover that the Christmas album put out last year by one of my favourite artists of all time, Jamie Cullum, was available in Atmos. I had already bought it on vinyl, and the hi-res lossless format, but to date there was no multichannel version. I took that for a spin and as the jingle bells completely engulfed me I was left grinning from ear to ear.

While continuing to browse Reddit I found their Dolby Atmos Highlights Megathread and, perhaps unsurprisingly, discovered that some albums definitely highlight the format better than others. You can tell some songs/albums were actually being properly remixed for the format, where as others feel more like they were run through a plugin with maybe had a few tweaks applied (though it's odd that this is exactly how I'd describe many of the tracks Apple is choosing to showcase the format). Clearly it will take some time for Artists and Producers to embrace the format, and hopefully as Apple adds more tracks we'll get more and more genuinely impressive demos of what Atmos can do. Certainly, I imagine it's only a matter of time before those 5.1 mixes of classic rock albums I had been collecting over the years will be making their way to the format.

So is Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos the “biggest advancement ever in sound quality” as Apple claims? Yes and no. When you actually have a system that can fully take advantage of it, I genuinely think the results are impressive, and scratch an itch I've had for years. But only in true surround setups. If you've never experienced true surround sound music, what Apple is doing here might be impressive, but for those of us who actually have and know how it can actually sound, the surround-over-headphones gimmick is exactly that; a gimmick. And it doesn't even really work that great. For now, I might disable it on my iPhone, simply because I find the Atmos mixes to be inferior to the original stereo mixes. I'll be curious to see how songs sound over AirPods Pro, and see how things change when they introduce head-tracking to the service in the fall (hopefully by then I'll actually have some AirPods Pro to test with). And then there's the technical issues with Apple's matching algorithm, but that's another story for another blog post.

So what do you think? Have you been impressed by Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio? Or are you like me and left underwhelmed and let down? Got a favourite track that you think showcases the format?

Update Jan. 18, 2022: Over the Christmas Holidays I got a pair of AirPods 3, which feature full Spatial Audio support (among some other great new features). As a result I've now had the chance to experience Spatial Audio over headphones, with dynamic head tracking, as intended.

While it's certainly an improvement over the previous experience, I still don't think it's as revolutionary as Apple makes it out to be; for music at least. I will say, with video content the effects are incredible. There have been multiple instances where the audio felt so lifelike I was convinced my AirPods weren't actually connected to my device. Yes, sometimes the "surround" effects are a little wonky, but on the whole the way it locks the audio image to the phone is really cool.

With music the effect feels a lot less natural though. Sure, when you move your head around you can hear the instruments moving more to one side or the other, but it doesn't feel as natural; it doesn't feel like the sound is actually coming from the phone the way it does with video. It's a cool enough effect, but still doesn't quite fully replicate the experinece of a true surround set-up.

Which, speaking of, is the real killer feature here. I've continued to listen to many albums in 5.1 surround on my home theatre setup using my AppleTV and have been absolutely blown away by some of the mixes being put out. The "Spatial Audio over headphones" experience absolutely pales in comparison to a true surround experience. You absolutely must give it a try if you haven't yet.