The argument for and against immersive audio
This is a sensitive topic among the studio community, but at some point all of us have to make a decision of whether we are going down this road. It is not cheap, nor easy. Is it the future of audio? I’ll let you read my conclusion here.
At the risk of alienating some readers, I have to be clear on where we stand regarding immersive audio and in particular Dolby Atmos. This can be a changing position, of course. I'm writing this midway through 2025, so it is based on how the world looks right now, but that can (and does) change.
I think it happened sometime around the mid 1990s. Those of us who worked in the technology space focused on how we could be of service to others. That probably hasn't changed much - I will always ask my clients what their goals are and make sure I'm the right fit to help them achieve that. But this world changed. Around the dawn of the Internet, people didn't have a clear set of goals for the future. They became reactive. They had no idea what eBay was - they'd buy used stuff through a newspaper ad. They had no idea you could book an airline ticket in front of your computer - they would go to a travel agent for that. They had no idea that food could be ordered on an app on their phone - they would call the pizza place and give them an order for delivery. Or worse (god forbid), get in the car and go there to eat in the restaurant or pick it up.
Now everything changed and the tech industry found themselves one step ahead of society. No longer could they ask society what they wanted. They invented it, and they offered it. Society now had to respond to all of this. This created winners & losers. If you got it right, you had billions of people as a captive audience that would adapt their needs to the tech - not the other way around. As the tech got better, the adaptation became a way of life. Now hordes of people would line up to watch the new unveiling of what those tech wizards came up with. Like moths to the flame, they would line up at 4AM at the Apple store to sample and acquire the new gold.
Solutions looking for a problem
The challege here was that the tech industry had to be ahead of the problems of society because they had already solved them all. This is a dilemma for the tech industry. Now our social construct was based around constant and predictable growth. Less people had to work because of the tech. More were shareholders and investors in these tech firms, and they demanded at least annualized returns of 10% per year in order to survive. The law changed to support the shareholder over the needs of the customer, so that meant the tech industry had more and more responsibility to be wizards and invent something that would look like an episode of Star Trek. Society were given a strawman of how the future would look, and goddamn it - we are going full Jetsons.
This was particularly true of manufacturers. Now physical goods were waning while digital goods were ascending. You could outsource production of digital goods anywhere on the planet. Physical goods manufacturing was outsourced to regions that were cheaper (ie. China, India, Vietnam, Mexico, etc.) and that helped those shareholders in their quest for greater returns. But at some point, people just had enough stuff. Digital subscriptions began to become a thing, because those shareholders were super happy with predictable and increasing income from your Netflix subscription, and little by little it could be raised 10% each year, while the technology costs (based on Moore's law) were halving every 18 months. What great news for the shareholders.
In this quest the customer was forgotten. Technologists would continually invent - and they would leverage the previous inventions to go exponential. Artificial intelligence became a thing. Eventually the machines that were created were blessed with the ability to grow themselves and the future was cast forward. Now even the technologists could sit back and watch their robots do the work - even the inventing. What could possibly go wrong?
Well it is pretty obvious. The customer - the human - was forgotten. The individual was studied, modeled and improved. But the spirit of the human was forgotten. In a quest to negate the organic flaws of one species, the tech attempted to "jump the shark" and create something that maybe the human didn't exactly want.
There were previous examples of this - the most noteworthy was 3D video. I remember not that long ago, when those corporations who were freaked out over copyright infrigement and piracy, atttempted to lock down their creations by enclosing them in packages that only they could produce. 3D video, which made everyone sitting in a movie theater look like a total dweeb, became the thing. Hollywood tried this for decades and failed everytime. Why? Because people just didn't want it. They didn't want to wear some stupid glasses. This lesson seems to go unlearned though - Apple fails at their Vision Pro line. Samsung tries and fails with theirs. Did they learn nothing from Google Glass? Or the myriad of those that came before them and found that people just don't want to have to wear anything to consume?
But for a period, every big screen TV that you could buy was a 3D TV. It became a gimmick that manufacturers used to try and be better than their competition. People just didn't want it though. So it died a natural death. This was a solution looking for a problem. People just wanted a nice new TV set, with a better resolution than the one they bought 10 years ago, and manufacturer shareholders were demanding that 10% increase year on year. You can see the disconect here.
The history of fail in audio tech
Like the failure of 3D video, audio had tried it too. In the 1980s, it was quadraphonic audio. 4 speakers instead of 2. Then it became 5.1 surround sound. The 7.1 sound. Let's add a subwoofer, and rear speaker to the mix. Now it is immersive audio - Dolby Atmos or Sony 360. Now you need 7 or 9 or 14 speakers. But the sound is all around you, and you are put in the middle of something to "experience" it.
I've sat, many times, in immersive mix rooms and experienced that. It is really amazing. You have a different perspective of something. You believe you are on stage with the band. For mix engineers, it blows the mind. You have to mix according to that perspective. Even recording based on that deliverable changes. Microphone placement is based on what will translate to a 360 degree space, rather than what is in front of the listener.
Then those technologists come up with a way to encode this in earbuds or headphones. Binaural technology allows the earbuds or headphones to have a computer in them, so it will take the encoded audio and create a simulation of a 360 degree experience. Amazing - those techies have done it again. Despite having tried to do this with expensive speaker setups in homes, this time it is going to be different.
And the beneficiaries are the tech hardware manufacturers. Now you will pay $200-$500 for earbuds or headphones. And you will spend $2500 for a home speaker setup, in a perfectly tuned room, to "experience" your media.
The movie theaters invested bigtime in this because they feared becoming obsolete. They saw what happened to the Drive-In theaters. They had to find a better way to become a place of experience - they started to serve gourmet food and drinks with the movie experience. But they were competing with the endless array of media content that was being sent down the pipes of the Internet to the homes. And if homes were expected to spend big on their media gear, why would you ever go to the theater? Movies started to go straight to streaming, and the piracy issues that those movie studios were worried about were gone because now you would pay $28 a month for Netflix and you didn't need to have a DVD or Bluray collection at home. It was all available - just keep your credit card alive and pay the monthly subscription fees.
Now the media distributors became intermixed with the hardware manufacturers. Apple sold you the phone, the earbuds, the headphones, but also you had the Apple Music subscription. Or Apple TV. One stop shopping experience. No one had a record collection anymore because a $12 a month Spotify account gave you everything ever recorded. Musicians focused on their new music going straight to Spotify. They stopped making CDs and no one had CD players in their cars anymore.
Then the big music distributors (Apple & Spotify) forced the immersive issue. They told musicians that if they wanted to be featured on playlists and their algorithms suggesting their new music, they had to release in Dolby Atmos immersive format. It didn't matter what the consumer wanted - it was going to be forced upon them, so that Apple could sell more earbuds & headphones and force the customer into their eco-system. This is how you become one of the biggest corporations in the world with market caps that rival most countries. And how you keep the shareholders richer and earning that 10% increase every year.
The studios are forced into this
To create a immersive Dolby Atmos mix a studio should be certified by Dolby. This means you have to adhere to a rigged set of standards for room design, and most importantly speakers. Speaker manufacturers used to sell you two speakers - right & left. That's because we have two ears. The mixing engineers would focus on how they could take the recording of the music and deliver it through that constraint to the listener. Decades and decades of learning of frequency, compression, gain, etc. become the focus. Maybe some panning here and there to move things between the two ears, but that's about it.
Now the studio is expected to buy 13 speakers and a subwoofer in order to produce an "object oriented" mix for the listener. It changed the economics - the best stereo speaker set might incur a cost of $10,000+ for a studio. Even a smaller home studio would spend $1500 on a pair of great speakers to let the mix engineer find a truthful representation of a mix that would translate to the average human. Meanwhile those average humans, with their flawed and unique organic ears, would listen to the mix on their crappy phones, or Bluetooth connected speakers. The listening environment was more dynamic and less predictable.
Who exactly was the customer now? It had to be the tech manufacturers that were forcing this immersive mix thing on the musicians. And now the studio was expected to spend $50,000 on a room full of speakers, optimized to meet the certification standards, just in order to compete as a professional studio. It is great for bragging rights and to try and make one studio look better than another, but if economics teaches us anything, those costs have to be passed down to the clients - the musicians.
Musicians have no money
Just as the techies took over the concept of invention from the customers, they take over the wealth transfer too. They build billion dollar data centers for their servers, and massive bandwidth pipes and network routers to make it all distribute over the Internet. No small operation can compete with this. So they build a natural firewall between the mega tech corporations and anyone wanting to compete with them. Then they feed the need for these billion dollar data centers with "content". Anything that is digital that can flow over those networks.
They live in the illusion that the creators of said content have all this cheap technology to make it. They think that because Billie Eilish can make albums on a laptop computer, there is no need to pay musicians to create the content. Spotify reduces the payout for streaming music to the musicians down to $0.003 and now only those that "go viral" are able to eek out a living from this. Yet every musician who comes into a studio is going in there with the express goal of creating something to release on Spotify? How does this make any sense?
The lack of income that the musicians have reflects in the budgets for making studio productions. There are no "records" per se. Those shiny discs that used to fund an entire music industry with record labels are gone. So are the record labels and so are the record label budgets. Now the musicians directly pay the recording studio. And they are broke.
Meanwhile the studio just forked out $50,000 for those Dolby Atmos speakers and for the bragging rights that they are Dolby certified.
See the disconnect here? There is no sense in having a facility that supports musicians, if they have no money to pay for the facility and it is suicide to increase the costs of said studio by falling prey to, ultimately, what is making Apple, Spotify & Dolby wealthy.
But if this is all about the experience of immersive audio, maybe that is enough to just suck it up and go into debt with a bank in order to play in that camp. For the studio, the ultimate test has to be the listener demand for this, and this is where the nail in the coffin of this whole scheme falls short.
The listener push back
At the time of writing this, modern economies in the world (ie. USA, Europe, Australia, etc.) are dealing with rampant inflation. This is mainly due to a pandemic that, for years, stopped people from working. Prior to the pandemic, in the USA, Forbes magazine reported that 78% of American families were living pay check to pay check. They didn't have enough money to pay for their expenses each month, and wages had been flat and not rising. With all of this, however, they still found a way to get credit cards and buy the latest iPhone. The illusion was real - to be a successful modern day societal member, you had to have the gadgets.
Now due to money printing to keep the ship sailing through the choppy seas of COVID, eventually that money has to be paid back. And the way that happens is to devalue the dollar because there are more of them in circulation. Now a dozen eggs cost $20. Rent has doubled. A new car is $100,000.
Luxury items are the first to go. No one is going to spend big time on non-essentials. I mean maybe those that found themselves in a lucky position of having a chair when the music stopped might. But that doesn't represent the bulk of society. And even those folk are going to be more critical of where they spend their money.
Will they spend $2500 on a new home theater speaker system for this immersive experience?
Well the audience has voted and the answer is clearly NO. I go to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) every year in Las Vegas and I've seen the tech trends. I watched the whole 3D TV thing die a natural death. And at no time have I seen more than two or three major vendors who forked out millions for prime booth space at this prestigious event show off anything to do with Dolby Atmos or immersive audio. Now I also go to NAMM (the National Association of Music Merchandisers) who represent the music equipment manufacturers, and you see it there. But not the consumer and ultimately, as I started this article, we forgot the customer when we had the techies tell them what they wanted.
In this case, and in these economic times, the customer has spoken. NO - they don't want to spend big on immersive audio. Sure, the movie theater will but they are struggling to put bodies in chairs to watch the latest Hollywood blockbuster and had to incent them with a great eating experience to get them there. While that industry is consolidating, and small theaters die off, you would have to be insane to think that people have the money to blow for a massive home theater investment and they certainly don't have the money to spend for 15 speakers to get the sound sound quality the recording studio has for their mixes.
Maybe the automotive industry will support Atmos. Luxury cars could have speakers all around the driver for that experience. Surprisingly, it doesn't seem to be enough to force someone to spend $100,000 on a new truck or car for this. Sure, the high end, but is that the audience that the average musician wants? Do they go to see their concerts? Probably not. It is the twenty something demographic that buy all the tickets, and they sure as hell don't have a million dollars to blow on a big house, home theater system and a brand new car.
Back to the drawing board, guys
In this world of techie supremacy, when what used to be inventions in someone's garage were possible, now the billion dollar data center seems to be the albatross around the necks of any software coder. They have even destroyed their own industry with AI replacing entry level software developer positions. Maybe the entire construct here of technology driving humanity is the issue.
I personally think musicians understand this better than anyone. They are out there, in the clubs, bars, concert halls, etc. playing to human beings. They don't perform to robots. They are in the business of creating goosebumps to their audience. And they realize there is a time & place for synthetic reality. Sure, EDM and techno dance styles are super popular for those wanting to escape from the horrible pay check to pay check world. But if they also feel the pain of their audience, maybe they simply understand that we have enough tools with our wooden instruments to deliver such an experience to an audience.
Sure, we can buy big amplifiers. We can get the latest Akai MPC or synth keyboard. But if 40,000 years of human history and evolution has taught us something, and the songwriter surely knows this, it is the emotional experience of relating to the human journey that is the reason Taylor Swift is so popular. It isn't that her music is released only on Dolby Atmos that drives her popularity. If everyone starts to realize that we are all humans, with unique organic ears, and we all are flawed in some manner, that maybe seeking out digital and technological perfection is a pointless exercise that only makes shareholders richer.
Should Dolby Atmos be the goal? I'm going to say NO. If I get a client in the studio that must have an Atmos mix, we can handle that - but I'll outsource it to friends that have invested heavily in that world, and are experts in creating that experience. I'm just not sure that it should be us, and it should force the raising of studio daily rates to accommodate what clearly appears to be rejected by the listeners.