Repost from LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/music-memory-spatial-audio-mixing-dolby-atmos-guy-fletcher-xr9te/
I once played a Dolby Atmos mix that I had just finished to the singer of the band I was producing. It was his first exposure to the format.
After a minute or so, I noticed tears in his eyes. When the song had finished, he said, ‘it’s like listening to every monitor mix I ever did of this song’. I knew exactly what he meant.
Atmos had somehow restored the little things that get sacrificed along the way when you’re making a stereo record. The tiny details. The decisions nobody notices because they’re buried beneath more important decisions.
It’s a bit like cleaning out a drawer and discovering things you didn’t know you’d lost. Atmos is full of moments like that. It doesn’t change the music so much as liberate it.
I’m reasonably certain that every Atmos mix engineer will tell you the same thing: working in the immersive world is enormously rewarding. There is something undeniably captivating about stepping beyond the confines of stereo and into a fully three-dimensional soundscape. Once you have experienced that freedom, stereo can seem a little constrained by comparison.
And yet, stereo remains an extraordinary format. Elegant in its simplicity, immediate in its impact and remarkably effective at delivering music to the widest possible audience.
When working in spatial audio, the stereo mastered file is – of course – the reference point in creating any Atmos mix, especially with ‘legacy’ albums. Most of the time spent, certainly in the latter stages of a mix, is spent referencing the stereo. But checking your three-dimensional work against the two dimensions of stereo can sometimes seem like comparing chalk with cheese: it’s more to do with matching the emotional impact than making it sound the same.
This is where the format differences become very apparent.
The most immediate revelation is space itself. The moment you begin placing objects or building beds around the listener, the music seems to breathe and expand. Mix or bus compression suddenly seems rather pointless. Sounds are no longer confined to a flat line between two speakers. Instead, they occupy a living, sculptural environment with depth, height and dimension. It is this sense of space, and the creative possibilities it unlocks, that makes immersive mixing so compelling and, for many engineers like me, quite addictive.
Yet there is a curious paradox at the heart of immersive music. While Atmos has become widely available, only a tiny fraction of listeners can experience it through the kind of multi-speaker system on which it was mixed. Most hear a translated version through headphones, soundbars or via other forms of virtualisation. Some rewards are still there, but we remain a great distance from making truly immersive playback universal.
This is, I think, the greatest challenge facing immersive audio today. Creating extraordinary Atmos mixes is no longer the obstacle. The real challenge is ensuring that the sense of space, scale and emotional impact that makes immersive mixing so exhilarating, can be faithfully experienced by the vast majority of listeners who do not own a dedicated Atmos speaker system.
The future success and longevity of immersive music will likely depend as much on solving this playback problem as it does on the continued evolution of the format itself.
My first experience of mixing in Dolby Atmos was more of a baptism by fire than a gentle introduction. The project was the Dire Straits Money For Nothing compilation. Released in 1988, it is a collection of songs spanning the band’s first five albums. That presented a unique challenge, as the sound of each album was quite different – different engineers, studios, outboard and tape machines. This meant I had to take each song as its own entity, unlike mixing a whole album where the sound is consistent in terms of reverbs, effects and compression.
Each song arrived with its own technical quirks, limitations and possibilities. Some multi-tracks were incomplete, with elements either missing or buried within decades-old tape archives. There were moments when I felt more like Hercule Poirot than an Atmos engineer – piecing together clues and following trails in search of the original recordings.
That detective work became an integral part of the process. What initially appeared to be an obstacle soon revealed itself as one of the most fascinating aspects of the project, forcing me to engage with each recording at a deeper level, uncovering details, performances and textures that had long been obscured within the confines of stereo.
The next album on the to-do list was Brothers In Arms. No pressure, then…
Revisiting Brothers in Arms for Dolby Atmos was both a technical challenge and a very personal journey. It had been my first project with the band: hearing the original multi-track recordings again transported me straight back to AIR Studios Montserrat, where the album was recorded in 1984, using the then-pioneering Sony 3324 DASH digital tape machine.
The quality of those recordings remains remarkable, a testament to the skill of engineer Neil Dorfsman, especially considering that the A/D converters of the day were, by today’s standards, ‘agricultural’. Preparing the Atmos mix required painstaking work assembling and organising decades-old digital and analogue masters – much of which had already been undertaken during Chuck Ainlay’s excellent 5.1 remix two decades earlier, making my task considerably easier.
The real challenge lay in respecting an album that has become woven into the lives of millions of listeners. While 5.1 and Atmos share some similarities, Atmos offers a very different creative canvas. The challenge was never technical – the challenge was emotional.
Brothers in Arms long ago stopped belonging solely to the people who made it. The playbacks I attended following the release of the Atmos mix – and the tears I saw in the eyes of fans who had grown up with the album – suggested that the mission had been accomplished.
More recently – just last week, in fact – I sat down with Mark Knopfler to approve the Atmos mixes I have completed for On Every Street, Dire Straits’ final studio album. By 1992, when the album was originally recorded, technology had moved on once again. It was recorded on Sony’s 3348 half-inch digital tape machine, a magnificent piece of engineering, which represented a significant step forward from the earlier 3324, although still some distance from the smoothness and warmth we take for granted today.
Mark remarked on how different the Atmos experience felt compared to the stereo mix, and as we listened, the afternoon became something rather special. Like many artists, Mark is not one for looking back, and I suspect he had not heard the album in its entirety since its release more than three decades ago.
As the songs unfolded around us, so too did recollections of the immense effort, craftsmanship and countless hours that had gone into their creation, not least Jeff Porcaro’s inimitable drum performances, particularly on the opening track, Calling Elvis, which remain among the album’s many highlights.
What had begun as a technical approval session became something far more rewarding: a chance to experience a significant chapter of our lives through an entirely new lens.
Atmos has a curious ability to reveal not just the details within a recording, but also the memories embedded within it. In that respect, at its best, the spatial audio experience is as much about rediscovery as it is about technology.