That is the question.

By Bill Heestand

I am passionate about music and spatial audio, which is a technology that places sound in different locations and heights in your listening space. I will explain the origins and features of spatial audio and the main formats available, including but not limited to Dolby Atmos and 360 Reality Audio. We’ll understand the challenges and limitations of stereo sound and the factors to consider when choosing a music streaming platform that supports spatial audio. I’ll share some of my personal experience upgrading my equipment from two channel audiophile grade to enjoying spatial audio to the fullest.

In Simon Sinek’s now famous TedX talk, "Start with Why" he presents the law of diffusion of innovation. Spatial audio has now moved well into the early majority stage of innovation.

The innovators, those who created the technology for spatial audio have been at it for decades. I remember a client of mine in the late 1990’s who was traveling all the time and pulling in nearly $500k consulting on something called object-oriented technology. Well, what we have in spatial audio is object-oriented technology. At first Dolby Labs and the movie studios wanted a more immersive experience for movie goers. It saw its first premier courtesy of Disney’s Brave at a theater in 2012. Twelve years have passed since then and much has changed in our homes. New TV’s, AVR’s and soundbars are nearly universally available with Dolby Atmos capabilities. What objectifying sounds allows for is the placement of elements of the music in various areas in your listening space. In some cases this is just a greater sense of ‘there is more there, there’. In some cases, the drums are next to but also over your right shoulder while the piano is front left and slightly up. More often the lead vocal is center but often then supporting vocal parts are separated into various parts of the speaker array. Usually, it is so subtle that you’re not listening to the placement of the sound but the overall experience is that word – immersive. The innovators and early adopters like me have already been passed by the larger audience now enjoying spatial audio. 

Let’s dig into these questions:

• What is spatial audio and should you engage now?
• How does it enhance the listening experience?
• What are the challenges and limitations of stereo sound making spatial audio so attractive?
• What are the main technologies for spatial audio and how do they differ?
• What are the benefits of objectifying sounds and placing elements in the upper parts of the speaker array?
• What are some of the factors to consider when choosing a music streaming platform that supports spatial audio?

I’m writing this for those who want to expand their entertainment experience. From stereo to surround sound, whether it is 5.1 or 7.1 to the amazing holographic world of spatial audio. Yes, of course, these technologies are great with movies. However, the availability of visual content for streamers is not huge. From my searches on the big three, Amazon Prime, Netflix and Disney/Hulu, only Disney makes significant availability of movies with spatial audio. Yes, you can purchase hard copies but that door is rapidly closing with recent announcements covered elsewhere, physical discs are soon phasing out. 

It’s all about the music.

For me, it’s all about the music. Streaming through two of the big three music streaming platforms, Amazon Music HD and Apple Music has thousands of hours and thousands of recordings available now, with new releases of remasters and new works coming out every week.

Let me clear up something right now. I am a recovering Audiophile with all the quirks and geekiness that entails. I was one because I’ve been a devoted fan of recorded music for over 50 years. It is where this article gets its energy. It is about THE music not THE technology. In the audiophile world it is necessary to spend vast amounts of money to achieve a transparent sound stage through two speakers from the one sweet spot. For less than megabucks, one can achieve a nice listening experience, but it doesn’t quite reach transparency, unless the space is quite small. The reason transparency is important is, again, THE music. My ideal has always been to enjoy the performance rather than the equipment. The equipment delivers the music so that the equipment is not in the way. But the sweet spot limits the enjoyment to one position in the room with degradation as you move away from it.

My journey from being a two-channel audiophile to discovering the world of spatial audio proved to me that there is a more immersive and transparent listening experience available. I want to share how to enjoy the four main technologies that enable spatial audio.

The spatial discovery.

In about 2019 my subscription to Amazon Music HD regularly had music that was in my heavy listening rotation which was newly published with a Dolby Atmos icon. Intrigued, I read that Dolby Atmos entered into my life circa 2021 with a JBL Bar 9.1 and Sony ES series AVR capable of 5.1.4 Dolby Atmos. Soon, there was another icon that arrived: 360 Reality Audio. Wait, what? I thought Dolby Atmos was it. It turns out that Sony Music was using this technology in a big way. Sony, you should know, owns one of the largest and most extensive catalogs of music from artists, classic and new. While Dolby Atmos is more dominant, artists from Santana and Pink Floyd to H.E.R and Lil Nas X have released tracks in 360 Reality Audio. Well, that complicated things a bit. If what you are after is an unrestricted access to music that envelops you in a cocoon of rich sound, you’re going to need to find sources that reproduce in ways that don’t restrict you. Alas, my Sony ES didn’t have the required MPEG-H tech to decode 360 RA. In addition, my Roku ultra didn’t fully exploit the benefits of spatial audio. I ultimately purchased a Denon X3800H AVR and Fire Cube Gen 3 which delivers it all.

This brings us to another fabulous capability in the realm of spatialization. What if the track you are lusting to hear is not in either of the technologies mentioned above but you want it in Spatial? Enter Auro-3D and DTS Neural :X, two competing technologies that spatialize any track from native two channel dull-drum to multi-channel magnificence.

As a summary, there are the four main technologies: 

• Dolby Atmos, 
• 360 Reality Audio, 
• Auro-3D and 
• DTS Neural :X.  

Spatializing your music is going to transform your musical enjoyment like nothing has before. 

I’m a music enthusiast who listens to hours of music in many genres each day. You’ll love listening to dedicated Dolby Atmos and 360 Reality Audio playlists, then switch it up and put on a playlist that includes stereo tracks and upscale them. My preference is Auro-3D but DTS Neural :X is many people’s preference.  I’m not disparaging DTS in any way, this is just a preference. Both upscaling technologies can be found resident on many of the AVR options we’re going to evaluate in the future.

When it comes to AVR’s that incorporate all four technologies the list of available products becomes shorter. The good news is it runs a wide range in price. This article is to give you a lay of the land and not the definitive guide to purchasing the gear you are going to want for many years of satisfying reproduction.  

To begin you need to make a difficult choice. 

You are going to choose to base your listening on the Apple or Amazon platforms. You might be a Spotify fan but as of this date, they have not yet revealed their upgrade to higher fidelity and continue to serve music in a LoFi mode. I am not covering Tidal of Qobuz because their platforms don’t reach deeply into the consumer space. 

There are good reasons to choose either of the big dogs, so let’s cover some of them now.

*The technology that makes this accessible to everyone is called Binaural Audio. Without getting into the weeds, both Apple and Amazon facilitate the condensing of the full spatial experience to a two-channel environment via Bluetooth. It means you don’t have to spend a dime more on equipment. You just need to make sure your device and app are switched to permit UltraHD and Spatial Audio. Admittedly, spatial uses more bandwidth on your cell phone plan, but limited data plans are few and far between these days. If you do subscribe to one, spatial music is going to use gigabytes fast so be cautious.

Understand what you’re going to get and how:

It’s important to note that 2024 marks the early stage of this mass upgrade of the music market. A tiny fraction of the scope of recorded music has been released in Dolby Atmos and 360 Reality Audio. It’s like the transition from vinyl to CDs.

It’s not yet ubiquitous

Today many albums will have one or two tracks that are spatial while the remaining tracks are in their two-channel format. This can be somewhat maddening if you are trying to have a full spatial audio listening session without having to hunt and peck out the tracks that are spatial. This brings me to playlists. I’ve spent many years curating music into playlists that offer variety and interest while being effortless listening. These are way better than your 1980 mix tapes for sure.

Disclosure. I tried Apple, Tidal and Amazon when I first fully equipped my room with spatial audio. This full upgrade started about 18 months ago and is ongoing. I used Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire devices. For my preference I’m using the Amazon ecosystem. Fire Cube and Stick delivers all four formats to my Denon X3800H AVR and Dolby Atmos to my JBL Bar 9.1 giving me full access to spatial without breaking the bank. 

There are Apple dedicated people in my Atmos Facebook group who are convinced that Dolby Atmos through Apple TV is IT and they wish for nothing more. For me, limits like that are not my cup of tea. To date I have 66 hours of Dolby Atmos and 360 Reality Audio in rock, pop, jazz and classical music genre playlists and that keeps listening fresh. In addition, I have another 100+ hours of stereo music in various playlists. My main criteria is the track has to be musical in every way. Bad recording? No. Poor performance? No. Repetitive unmusical sounds? No. My tastes may not be yours but you’re welcome to check the playlists out on Amazon, they’re public. They’ll be listed in the footnotes.

When you’re ready to join the spatial music revolution, we aim to equip you with the best information available as this industry evolves. Keep coming back over the coming months to see what we’ve got brewing in our holographic spatial audio zone.

Special thanks to Bill Heestand for his insights in this article.