Dolby has done an incredibly job of making the general public recognize it as an audio gold standard. Sure, it has decades of movie theater ads to thank in part. But even folks who barely know what Dolby Atmos is know it’s meant to be good.
One tech giant says Dolby can’t, shouldn’t, be the future of surround and immersive audio, though. It’s Samsung.
Samsung made one of the first great Dolby Atmos soundbars, the HW-K950 from 2016. But when we visited Samsung’s Audio Lab in California, we were given a view of the future where Dolby is no longer top dog of multi-channel audio. The company has paired with Google to launch Eclipsa Audio, which is a rival to Dolby Atmos for the future of 3D sound at home.
Why? Samsung Audio Lab VP Allan Devantier says Dolby is “strangling” the one area where immersive audio content could be flourishing the most: the humble content creator.
Dolby dis-content
“They can’t make immersive content because to make Atmos content costs too much money,” says Devantier.
As a proprietary audio format, Atmos comes with additional licensing fees, and admin, to get certified in order to mix down those immersive audio tracks. This may be part of the reason YouTube currently does not support Dolby Atmos, or any multichannel audio, at present – Eclipsa Audio support is coming in 2025, though.
“We're working with Netflix and Amazon, and we're developing an audio standard that's going to be free of royalties, so that all content can be created in immersive audio… and they don't get nickeled and dimed by a small company in San Francisco, so we can get immersive audio to everybody,” says Devantier.
That company nickel-ing and dime-ing everyone? Yep, he’s talking about Dolby again.
Devantier paints Dolby as the major limiting actor in three-dimensional “immersive” audio becoming a mainstream thing too, an all-too-conservative influence on what could be the next stage in audio development.
“Dolby is not involved in gaming seriously, and they’re not involved in in-car audio. And they’re things we want to we involved in. We want to give great sound to everybody all the time,” says Devantier.
Surround sound headsets and the far more persuasive proliferation of spatial audio in headphones and consoles means we’re on-board for the gaming side. But in-car? I'm not sure any amount of EQ could save the audio of the cars I've owned – but it's also only fair to point out that there's basically a yearly showcase of Dolby Atmos in cars.
Total Eclipsa
Google and Samsung have talked about their competitor standard, originally dubbed IAMF (Immersive Audio Model and Formats), since early 2023 – and they're promising that it'll be widely supported, even though no streaming has announced support yet.
“It’s completely driven by Google and Samsung, two huge companies, with the support of the Alliance of Open Media, which is big… all the major streaming services are involved in this thing. It’s going to be a big deal,” says Devantier.
And while its spec isn’t quite as lofty as maxed-out Atmos, it should offer more than enough for a satisfying immersive audio experience.
“The way the codec is being designed, it can carry up to 28 streams of audio,” says Devantier. “The number of channels is enough for there to be a third order of Ambisonics as well as 12 streams of audio.”
Ambisonics here means a full sphere of sound, including overhead and underneath. Ambisonic microphone setups can be pretty expensive, but they don’t have to be. Budget buyer favourite Zoom makes a series of super-affordable Ambisonics microphones and audio players.
The hope is that these also make it a relatively low-effort job for content creators and journalists to start making immersive audio content.
“Imagine you’re a BBC reporter, out on the streets. You cannot do immersive content for reporting today,” says Devantier.
“Fast forward 2-3 years from now. You have the close mics for the interviewer, interviewee, replace the camera microphone with a third-order Ambisonics microphone. This offers 16 streams of audio plus two-to-three streams of channel-based audio. It gets to the studio at the BBC and, no problem for the mixing person. Left channel, right channel, crank up the street sound. I’ve got immersive content.”
In that scenario, immersive audio might go from a nice aspiration to have one day, to a “why not.” And the idea is that even more approachable hardware for the job will come with a similarly approachable format. As Devantier explains, “every single little bit you need: the rendered, the endorsers, the code itself. All those things all exist free and open.”
Immersion at home
A big part of Samsung’s job here is actually making the hardware that we'll listen to this stuff on, as consumers rather than creators. Eclipsa Audio is arriving on Samsung 2025 soundbars and its new TVs, with the promise of support on Google TVs and LG TVs.
Before it's been possible to try the format, I took a visit to Samsung Audio Lab itself. This is where the most high-profile Samsung audio equipment gets designed, voiced and tweaked by a team of engineers led by veterans of the traditional hi-fi speaker scene.
I got to visit two rooms that offered a glimpse into the future of multi-channel home audio. One was a space filled with more than a couple dozen microphones, pointing anywhere and everywhere, while on the walls were a quartet of Samsung Music Frame speakers.
These speakers launched in 2024. The idea is they looks just like picture frames, but have three-way speaker drivers baked-in. “These sound far better than you’d guess” was the general reception from the press, including TechRadar.
But despite having wireless speaker-matching Samsung Q-Symphony tech, they’ve only been talked about as a stereo outfit so far. Samsung is working at getting them playing as a wider team of four. Who knows? Maybe more too. And that’s why the room was filled with an obstacle course of microphones.
For speakers like this to work as a surround sound team in the real world, they need to be able to hear how the others sound. As we discovered in our tour of Samsung Audio Lab, these folks are obsessed with how Samsung speakers sound in real rooms.
I also got a second demo, one probably of more interest to the average AV fan. This demo room had a soundbar at its center, but the room was festooned with a huge number of Genelec studio monitors. I’ve wanted a pair of these for years, but have never been able to justify the expense. And here was a room filled with $48,000 worth of them. Heaven.
But that’s not really what I was there to listen to. The premise was we’d listen to the surround-sound Genelec array then hear a slim prototype soundbar at the center of it all, which was singularly failing to draw much attention in this land of the giants.
It was to be a demo about sound scale, and the ability to deliver clear immersive audio imaging when dealing with a complex surround mix rather than just simple stereo. There was some music, a film excerpt. The first demo sounded great. Big scale, solid spatial clarity with a sense of coherent 360-degree three-dimensionality, chest-rocking bass that didn't sound too flabby.
And in a classic tech company demo switcheroo, I was then told these weren't in fact $48,000 worth of Genelec, but a prototype of a potential future Samsung soundbar. After a bit of begging I also got to hear the Genelec rig.
In that case, there was a lot less bass volume, and mids with a flatter response. And they generally sounded a bit more relaxed and less "in your face” than the soundbar demo. But you could likely bring them closer together in performance by just toning down the Samsung subwoofer – not that you’d want to do so for movies.
The most interesting part was sitting behind us the whole time, though. Back there were a couple of small cube speakers on stands, looking every bit like a 3D printed prototype. But with similarly-sized drivers on multiple sides, they clearly max out in terms of channels per cubic inch – a next-gen version of what we've seen on the Samsung HW-Q990D's rear speakers already.
The remaining questions
I spoke to Samsung before Eclipsa Audio had been fully unveiled, and what's notable in the time since is that we've yet to hear about support from the actual streaming services, outside of future support in YouTube. It's coming to major TV platforms, and to Android – but haven't heard what you'll be able to watch in it.
That's the missing piece of the puzzle, though it's clear that the tech will be in many of the best TVs and best soundbars in the future, primed for when – or if – Samsung can achieve its lofty ambition of dethroning Dolby Atmos at last.
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