If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent a fair bit of time trying to find a pair of the best stereo speakers or best headphones, in search of the most faithful reproduction of actual live music. Historically, I’ve found myself imagining my perfect home sound system as standard stereo system – but a recent visit to a cutting edge 3D audio suite has me thinking that it could be time to start thinking beyond two channels.
I was recently lucky enough to join a listening session for Max Cooper’s new album On Being at L-Acoustics Hyperreal Immersive Sound Space – or HYRISS – showroom. An acclaimed composer and producer of electronic music, Cooper has long sought a sense of dimension in his work, employing binaural techniques and psychoacoustic trickery to give his stereo mixes more depth. Though his tracks do feel wider and deeper than typical dance music on a stereo system, within the walls of the HYRISS suite a new level of space was unlocked.
And when I say “within the walls”, I mean it literally. The HYRISS showroom houses a huge array of speakers hidden behind “trans-sonic fabric” – dozens of speakers and subwoofers in the ceiling, walls, and floor: as my TechRadar colleague James Davidson noted after his own visit (and TechRadar's Audio Editor Becky Scarrott explained after her various trips to the suite over the years), the system is set up in 17.1.12 surround sound, though the single sub channel is split between 34 individual subwoofers. The result is an uncompromisingly clear and staggeringly capacious soundstage – even in the hard techno rumble of the album’s heaviest moments, there was no sense of compression or distortion that wasn’t clearly a creative choice.
“The first spatial album I did was ten years ago,” Cooper told me during a subsequent Q&A, “and there’s been many times where I’ve been thinking ‘is this a waste of time?’ I love it, so it’s not a waste personally, but it’s only in the last few years that it’s been taking off”.
Continuing, Cooper added: “The first fully spatial audio festival in London was announced today. The fact there’s a whole festival devoted to spatial audio, there’s more and more venues and more and more people adopting it – the technology’s there, the interest there, the content’s there.” The festival in question is called Polygon, where Cooper is scheduled to perform in May.
Cooper was joined for the Q&A by Richard Burki, a renowned audio engineer who specialises in spatial audio and handled the spatialization for On Being: “All the technology is on the way already – most brands are integrating spatial and immersive technology, I think over the course of the next five to ten years it’s going to be quite commonplace to have access.”
“Artists like Max are critical for setting precedents for what’s possible with immersive and spatial,” Burki added, “3D is pretty much the way we hear sound in real life, it’s the way we were meant to hear sound and music as well. Mostly, the technology has been limited – up until now.”
Through the rest of the Q&A, the common thread in Cooper and Burki’s answers became clear: we’ve been limiting our thinking to stereo, but producing a faithful recreation of natural sound means thinking beyond channels altogether.
On Being was mixed using Dolby Atmos, then adapted to L-Acoustics' proprietary L-ISA platform. Though Atmos can support up to 64 speakers at once, the technology doesn’t store audio in channels before the point of reproduction. While an mp3 or wav file is effectively composed of two mono channels, left and right, Dolby Atmos files record the position of sound sources (called ‘objects’) on a high resolution 3D map, which is then reproduced to the best ability of whichever speakers are available.
Dolby Atmos is already available via select streaming services like Apple Music and Tidal, but for most people the only way to experience this is via headphones – which still have to approximate 3D space within two channels.
Bringing true multi-channel spatial audio to the everyday home is more of a challenge; systems such as HYRISS are well out of reach for the everyday consumer, and while L-Acoustics does offer several excellent high-end options for your home, it's fair to say the company cut its teeth supplying stadiums, rather than living rooms.
Any options available to the music-lover who wants a truly budget-friendly solution? Atmos-enabled soundbars have become relatively commonplace, and some are fairly affordable. The HiSense AX5125H system costs $350 / £350 / AU$450, and offers 5.1.2 surround sound – no wonder it’s our pick for the best budget soundbar for Dolby Atmos. Comparatively, the Samsung HW-Q990D soundbar and surround-sound system comes in at $1,799 / £1,699 / AU$1,995, offering 11.1.4. And of course, going the route of a Dolby Atmos enabled AV receiver, like the Denon AVR-S760H or Pioneer VSX-935, plus up to 64 speakers, can become as expensive as you’d like to make it.
I previously wrote that I spend around 14% of my waking hours on Spotify alone, but once SoundCloud, YouTube, and CDs are factored in, I reckon I'm listening to music for about a quarter of my conscious life. I hope to be able to recommend some more reasonably priced spatial audio systems as the years go on, but as it stands it's certainly a challenge for audio companies to make this stuff more accessible.
I do truly hope true spatial audio becomes more accessible, though. Hearing the soaring synth pads and furious bass of On Being on the HYRISS system proved the value of spatial audio to me before I’d even fully understood the proposition; my understanding of music as a directional and concentrated force was revoked, and instead I was enveloped in a sonic miasma – it was as if the music was coming from nowhere, instead generating in place with the same spontaneous bloom as natural sound. This was unlike anything I’ve ever heard, unlike anything I’ve ever felt – and that makes it something worth keeping an eye on.
Max Cooper seems to think so too, adding during the Q&A that his next album will be made in spatial audio from the ground up. On Being is out now, and if you’d like to experience it with a spatial twist as I have (and the UK is doable), be sure to check out tickets for Polygon Live in London.
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