What Is Dolby Atmos Music?
Dolby Atmos adds elevation to your soundstage. So, rather than sound simply going from left to right and front to back, Atmos lets you experience sound from top to bottom too. This technology immerses you in a world of sounds as if they were occurring in three-dimensional space.
Learn more about Atmos in How Surround Sound Evolved Into Dolby Atmos Technology.
For example, in movies, you can experience when the sound of a helicopter flies right over you with a true 3D sense of presentation. When the helicopter lands, you’ll hear and feel the sound travel down to your level just like it does in real life. To experience it with movies, you need a hardware source that can decode the Dolby Atmos content, and you’ll also need content that is encoded in this immersive format. And of course, you will need either an Atmos home theater system or a Dolby Atmos-enabled soundbar.
We cover all of this in our 2021 Best Dolby Atmos Soundbars comparison.
Now, for music, Dolby Atmos enables musicians to mix their music so it sounds like the instruments are all around you in three-dimensional space — and this is where the breakthrough exists. For decades the audio world has tried to recreate the sound you experience at a live concert by trying to synthesize sounds for the additional speakers in a home theater system. These processes worked ok, but they always sounded a little fake to our ears. With Dolby Atmos technology, the engineers can actually capture the full immersive sound of a live performance or mix a studio recording to completely cover us in the sound the artist desires.
So, it’s not just about getting great Dolby Atmos content on Netflix, Disney+, or HBOMax anymore. Now, it’s also about getting music that is three-dimensional. This means people who are into 2 channel music now have a reason to do full-room home theaters.
With tracks being mastered in immersive audio, if you to get the full experience, you’ll want speakers all around the room with Atmos-based receivers and processors. You can also use Atmos-enabled soundbars to experience Dolby Atmos music.
If you have a Dolby Atmos soundbar or even a full-room Atmos installation, your Atmos-enabled home theater system (or multichannel media room) just got way more valuable — and since Apple has announced Spacial Audio for their platform on Apple Music, the rules of high-performance audio are probably about to change. Apple has obviously been known to disrupt industries and we think their Spatial Music platform will quickly drive our favorite artists to record their new albums in Dolby Atmos.