VAN NUYS, CALIFORNIA — Simply off the freeway within the Valley is the Sound Metropolis Advanced, a horseshoe-shaped constructing in the midst of an industrial zone. The location as soon as featured the famed Sound Metropolis recording studios the place everybody from Fleetwood Mac to Nirvana to Johnny Money made a number of the world’s well-known data. Throughout the parking zone is one other studio, nevertheless it’s dedicated to one thing fully completely different.

I’m right here on the invitation of Will Kennedy and Mike Wallace, a few audio alchemists whose present job is popping stereo mixes into one thing greater and grander. Why have simply two channels of audio when you possibly can have 13?

The primary room of the studio is roofed in carpets on the ground and partitions. A small console sits close to the center, surrounded by a tall steel construction that holds 4 audio system on the high pointing down on the ground. The console, which options little greater than a keyboard and a few screens, is completely surrounded by extra audio system. All the things operates from a wild laptop interface. That is the place Will and Matt work on Dolby ATMOS and Spatial Audio variations of songs.

“Hearken to this,” says Will, poking on the keyboard. “We fully dismantled Love Shack by The B52’s and rebuilt it into an ATMOS combine. I do know you’ve heard it 1,000,000 instances, however simply hear.”

The track begins — and it sounds nothing like I anticipated. Fred Schneider’s lead vocal comes from someplace within the centre. The shut harmonies of Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson are clear and barely to the left. The bassline has a definition that I’d by no means observed earlier than. A guitar line, buried within the stereo combine immediately seems and provides melodic heft to the midrange. And it seems that the occasion sounds that we hear in varied locations within the track truly run by your complete track. With sound coming in any respect angles, I felt fully immersed within the music. It was … wild.

“That’s one thing, huh?” Mike is smiling. “Now do that.” He places on an ATMOS model of Religion No Extra’s Epic, a track Mike is aware of very effectively as a result of he produced the unique for the band again in 1989.

The guitar assault is spectacular, eclipsed solely by the bassline, which reveals itself to be extra intricate and heavy than the usual stereo combine allowed. Vocals come from all instructions. It’s like I’m within the studio with the organized round me. I’m enveloped in music from all instructions.

Will and Matt take me by extra of their work. A 20-year-old Jason Mraz track. An impossibly tight group taking part in trendy big-band music. A monitor steel band with layers and layers of guitars and vocals fully engulfs the listener in waves of superb noise. When the final be aware dies out, I can solely sit there in amazement. I’ve turn out to be a believer.

Earlier than at this time, I’d been very skeptical about this new know-how. Why attempt to enhance on songs which might be already classics? Wouldn’t this be like attempting to make the Mona Lisa extra high-res? Aren’t you messing with the artists’ unique imaginative and prescient? Are you creating new requirements for this music once we’ve been wonderful with what we’ve had all these years? And who can afford a house audio system with 13 audio system, all particularly organized and powered by amps that require their very own modular reactor?

Detractors will level to the failure of quadraphonic sound within the early Nineteen Seventies. Tremendous Audio CDs and DVD-Audio didn’t work, both. Yeah, there are some nice 5.1, 6.1, 7.1, and past mixes of traditional albums accessible in field units that sound nice on a house theatre, however these are for obsessives and audiophiles. What makes anybody suppose that this newest try and deliver additional excessive constancy to the plenty goes to work? (Sony additionally has one thing known as 360 Actuality Audio which follows completely different specs. I’m informed Sony is struggling to get this adopted by the business.)

Will is affected person with me. “For those who take a look at the dimensions of those recordsdata, they’re enormous. That B-52’s file is greater than two gigabytes. Examine that to round 70 megabytes for the unique .wav of track and possibly eight megs for an MP3 model. That’s as a result of this file comprises tons and many info, together with metadata that can permit the file to be ‘folded down’ into each a 5.1 combine and a stereo combine. In reality, what we’re actually going for is an immersive listening expertise on headphones. Any headphones — though like with something, the higher the {hardware}, the higher the software program — the music — will sound.”

Headphones, it seems, are the primary goal of these selling the brand new know-how. In reality, you’ll have already skilled Spatial Audio when you’ve received Apple Music or have downloaded specifically encoded songs from iTunes. As a substitute of “oh, that sound is coming from the left and people sounds are coming from the proper,” Spatial Audio tracks suck you in a little bit deeper. I nonetheless haven’t discovered a recording that brings the sound ahead so it appears to be coming from in entrance (headphone listening typically provides you the ship that a lot of the music is coming from behind), nevertheless it’s actually an enchancment.

One other benefit? The ATMOS requirements demand far much less compression on the end recordsdata. The quantity of dynamic vary that’s preserved within the recording is insane. Not like “loudness wars” casualties just like the Crimson Scorching Chili Peppers’ Californication and St. Anger from Metallica — two albums I discover unlistenable as a result of they’re compressed to the purpose of distortion — these ATMOS mixes breathe to the purpose the place you possibly can hear the area between the notes. It’s totally three-dimensional, identical to whenever you see a reside live performance. The music appears to return from in every single place unexpectedly.

Glancing on the folder crammed with mixes in progress, I see some very massive names, together with a pair with unreleased albums which might be within the technique of getting ATMOS-ized. These have been off-limits to me, after all.

Will ATMOS and Spatial Audio turn out to be the brand new normal?  Perhaps, particularly since so many individuals eat music by headphones. Will they discover after twenty years of listening to horrible MP3-quality audio? Will they even care?

Skeptics will say that that is simply an try and get us to purchase extra audio gear. Sure, it’s, however we haven’t had a mainstream revolution in audio constancy because the compact disc. Others level out that the individuals with an curiosity in these new mixes are pushed by revenue. After all, they’re! That’s the way it works. And except I’m mistaken, creating new mixes like these additionally means you’re creating new grasp recordings, thereby resetting the countdown clock on copyright again to zero. Which means these songs will keep out of the general public area longer.

And there are extra functions past music. We’re heading into the period of the metaverse. Solely immersive 3D sound goes to be a giant deal. Perhaps, simply possibly, that is the brand new tech we’ve been ready for.

On the drive again to Hollywood, I couldn’t get that B-52’s combine out of my head. It left me with such an excellent feeling that didn’t even thoughts the bump-and-grind on the 405.

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Alan Cross is a broadcaster with Q107 and 102.1 the Edge and a commentator for International Information.

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