Apple Spatial Audio With Dolby Atmos Support Released
On May 17th 2021, Apple announced Apple Music is bringing industry-leading sound quality to subscribers with the addition of Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos in June 2021. Today Apple officially released Spatial Audio, powered by Dolby Atmos for Apple music during its WWDC keynote. We have all the details…
Apple Spatial Audio with Support for Dolby Atmos
On May 17th 2021, Apple announced Apple Music is bringing industry-leading sound quality to subscribers with the addition of Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos in June 2021 at no additional cost.
Apple Music will automatically play Dolby Atmos tracks on all AirPods and Beats headphones as long as they are fitted with an H1 or W1 chip. Note that the AirPods Pro didn’t launch with spatial audio support, but it should download and install the required firmware automatically.
You don't need a pair of Apple or Beats headphones in order to listen to Dolby Atmos tracks from an iPhone or iPad – any headphones will work, as long as you enable a specific setting.
Once you've got the iOS/iPadOS 14.6 update, if you go into Settings on your iPhone or iPad and then to Music, a new Dolby Atmos option will be available. This is set to Automatic by default, which means Dolby Atmos tracks will play correctly when you're listening via any W1 or H1 enabled pair of Apple or Beats headphones (the AirPods Max, AirPods Pro or standard AirPods, for example), but not when you're using third-party headphones. However, if you switch this option to ‘Always On’, even these non-Apple headphones will play back the Dolby Atmos tracks correctly.
Because this implementation of spatial audio is sound-only, there's no head-tracking involved, and that opens it up to more devices. For example, while the Apple TV can't output spatial audio to a pair of headphones, it will support Dolby Atmos tracks from Apple Music when connected to an Atmos-capable sound system.
In addition, Apple Music will automatically play Dolby Atmos tracks through the built-in speakers in the latest versions of iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Devices will need to be running at least iOS 14.6, iPadOS 14.6, macOS 11.4 or tvOS 14.6 or later to access the spatial audio with Dolby Atmos support.
What About Apple Spatial Audio With Video Content?
However, for video content, you are going to need one of those two AirPods models and a compatible source device. When it comes to compatible devices, Apple TV 4K is getting updated to offer spatial audio, as are recent macOS devices like the M1 MacBook Pro.
For mobile usage you'll need an iPhone or iPad running iOS 14.6 or later. However, not all older Apple devices will work, even if they can be updated to the required version. This is the list of spatial audio-compatible mobile devices for video…
iPhone 7 or later
iPad (6th Gen) or later
iPad Air (3rd Gen)
iPad mini (5th Gen)
iPad Pro 12.9 inch (3rd Gen) or later
iPad Pro 11 inch (1st gen) or later
For macOS this is a list of the supported devices…
MacBook Pro (2018 model and later)
M1 MacBook Air (2020)
M1 MacBook Pro (2020)
M1 iMac (2021)
M1 Mac Mini (2020)
For tvOS you will need…
Apple TV (Music only)
Apple TV 4K (2021)
While you don’t need Atmos for spatial audio, the two working together will produce the best results.
Content Coming
Apple Music and Dolby have been working hard to make it as easy as possible for musicians, producers, and mix engineers to create songs in Dolby Atmos. Initiatives include doubling the number of Dolby-enabled studios in major markets, offering educational programs, and providing resources to independent artists.
Apple’s announcement has generated a real buzz, especially in the music production sector in mixing more content in Dolby Atmos as Apple’s platform is a key player in delivering content to the end-user. However, it appears that the process of delivering immersive audio to the Apple platform is not without its challenges.
Spatial Audio Event
You may be wondering what happened to the rumoured Spatial Audio-focused "special event," that was expected to happen yesterday after the WWDC keynote. It turns out that event is a discussion between Apple's Zane Lowe and music producers No I.D., Sylvia Massy, and Manny Marroquin, which is this YouTube video…
Spatial Audio And Dolby Atmos Coming To Apple Logic Pro
In an Apple press release, Apple Music radio host Zane Lowe revealed that Apple is building tools directly into Logic Pro that will allow musicians to create and mix their songs in Spatial Audio for Apple Music. Zane Lowe said…
"Apple is building immersive music-authoring tools directly into Logic Pro later this year. So any musician will be able to create and mix their songs in Spatial Audio for Apple Music — whether they're in the studio, at home, or wherever."
Binaural Processing With Apple Spatial Audio
It would appear that Apple is doing their own thing when it comes to binaural rendering with its new Spatial Audio platform. Apparently, Apple Music is using its own binaural rendering tools, which don’t take into account the off/near/mid/far parameters that are in the Dolby Atmos binaural renderer and it is not yet clear how the Apple rendering tools will work.
We understand that Apple is using a 5.1.4 downmix as the source to their own music rendering. Apparently, if you listen to a 5.1.4 re-render on an iPhone with Apple headphones, you can test their rendering engine ahead of doing your ADM Export.
It does seem to be a shame that Apple is choosing to bypass Dolby’s off/near/mid/far parameters and do their own thing. With Dolby’s 3 distance options, as engineers, we could set up how the listener would experience the Dolby Atmos mix and translate from a 7.1.4 speaker system to a binaural headphone/earbud experience and leads to us wondering if Apple thinks they can do it better than Dolby?
That said, there is speculation that Apple has done their own thing to reduce the complexity to work on the iPhone. Initially, on the iPhone, the Dolby Atmos spatialisation was derived from the DD+JOC and then decoded ready for playback. If Apple chose to use the Dolby Atmos binaural spatialisation then the iPhone would have to sense when the headphones were being used and then switch to Dolby’s binaural render, which would be a much more complicated process as Dolby uses 3 distances to simulate the room as well as the HRTF, all of which could be too complex to do on the phone as well as the speaker rendering.
If all of this pans out then content creators will need to develop systems to be able to listen to Apple spatialisation rendering to be confident that our mixes will play well through Apple’s binaural renderer.
But for now, the suggestion seems to be to create an MP4 export, which uses the EC3 format, from the Dolby Atmos Production Suite exporting and then load it onto your Apple device playback and check. If you have got a recent iPhone, iOS, AirPodPro and Airdrop, then you are good to go.
However, as we understand it, at present it is possible to monitor the effect of the codec conversion for iPhone, it’s not possible to do it on the Android platform as most devices use the AC4 format, which we understand cannot be exported from the DAPS Renderer supports export of AC4.
All of which makes ‘live’ comparisons impossible. What we really need is for Dolby to add the Apple spatialisation as a playback mode in DAPS and DAMS, we will have to wait and see.