I am a huge fan of Dolby Atmos music. I play it every day and I often carve out a few hours specifically to enjoy myself immersed in this spatial format which can place music elements both behind me and above.
But not on headphones. I play my Atmos music on what might be described as an upper midrange speaker system, delivering 5.1.2 channels – that’s five speakers on the floor, including surrounds out wide behind me and a subwoofer up the front, plus two speakers in forward height positions in order to deliver Atmos’ famous hemisphere of sound. (Yes, just a hemisphere; I’m still waiting for someone to realise they’re missing a trick with not yet embedding speakers in the floor to create a real sphere of sound. But perhaps I shouldn’t encourage them.)
Atmos on a full system
My sources for playing Atmos music are two-fold. My subscription to Apple Music allows access to a great many tracks mixed in Atmos, which can be served from an AppleTV 4K into my AV receiver. You can get Atmos from Tidal and apparently Amazon Prime Music (though not the free version), but Apple is my Atmos server of choice.
My main source, however, and particularly at the moment, is Atmos music on Blu-ray – discs with no video on them, but multiple mixes of an album, usually in Dolby Atmos, with some form of 5.1 or 7.1 surround as well, and high-res stereo. Sometimes instrumental Atmos mixes are also included as a bonus.
In fact over the last year I have developed a hair-trigger form of 'new-formatitis', an addiction to buying Atmos music discs which is costing me, well, not a huge amount of money, but has certainly upped my casual expenditure on music significantly. And mainly buying albums that I already have either on vinyl, CD or digitally. Doesn’t matter: when the latest Atmos Blu-ray release is announced, I’m clicking that email link and slapping my money down without a second thought.
It began with Morten Lindberg (38 Grammy nominations and counting) and his work for Norway’s 2L label; my early Atmos disc collection was dominated by his extraordinary in-the-moment Atmos recordings, and I’ve twice raved about them here on What Hi-Fi? (this one partly because of heartstopping performances by the wildly magnificent Catalina Vicens, and this one as being the most gorgeous of Christmas albums; there are plenty of others).
But of course surround discs had been around fpr a good while before Atmos arrived. For video discs, a surprising number of old music DVDs have excellent surround soundtracks, sometimes in 24-bit/96kHz – 'Best of Bowie', 'Queen's Greatest Hits', etc; I pick them out of boxes left on the street these days, or grab them for $2 a pop in charity shops. Like secondhand CDs, they can be a very cheap way to gather good music.
Early pop and rock surround music was also possible on the SACD format, while the emergence of audio Blu-rays was notably led by ‘Pure Audio’ discs, developed by msm-studios in Munich in 2009, beginning with lossless high-res LPCM stereo and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, then later adding Dolby TrueHD and Atmos.
Lossless Atmos music
An important word there is ‘lossless’. Why do I buy the Blu-rays, when I can usually listen to the same Atmos mixes on subscription via Apple Music?
Because Atmos streaming is heavily data compressed, arriving at bit-rates ranging perhaps from 384kbps to 768kbps. Compare those bit-rates with disc-based Atmos audio, at potentially 4500 to 8000kbps, and the numbers confirm what Morten Lindberg told me some time ago: that Atmos streaming is compressed by an high factor of perhaps 11 to 1. That's a similar compression ratio to ye olde 128k MP3s when compared to CD, or by AC3 Dolby Digital soundtracks as used on movie DVDs.
The lack of compression is immediately evident in the thrilling clarity of the best Atmos music Blu-rays.
Unfortunately some Atmos mixes can be awful, or just boring, with little more than atmospheric extension of the front soundstage into the rears. There’s no point in paying for that; indeed the stereo will likely serve better in such cases.
But when you do get a good ’un – oh wow.
Apple Music, then, is very useful both for listening to large numbers of Atmos releases, and for checking whether a particular new Atmos mix of a favourite album is bland or brilliant before putting down your money on the Blu-ray release.
However, by the time you can hear it, you may not be able to buy it. The company getting most of the money from my present addiction is SDE, and their releases are largely limited editions that become unavailable all too quickly; scroll through their ‘sold out’ back catalogue to confirm this. In fact I gather their model is to print not many more than were hard-ordered in the pre-release window, to avoid having “an attic full of unsold discs”. So if you miss that pre-sale window, you just ain’t going to get one. And if you wait to hear the mix on Apple after release, you might be too late to get in on the Blu-ray release. (Hence my trigger finger on all three most recent pre-sales: Alan Parsons' 'Eye in The Sky'; Chris Squire 'Fish out of Water'; Roxy Music's 'Flesh & Blood', the tour I saw them on. It's like they're going through my teenage record collection.)
Other Blu-rays are more widely and permanently marketed – the wham-bam brilliant Atmos mix of Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust’ by the original engineer Ken Scott, or Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’, both of which I highly recommend (the latter primarily to Floyd fans, though ‘Animals’ in 5.1 24/96 DTS-HD MA is the my most-played surround Floyd).
There’s one useful benchmark to confirm instantly that the Atmos mix certainly won’t be bland, and that’s if it’s by Steven Wilson, former Porcupine Tree frontman and absolute ruler of the modern Atmos remix. I bought his own 2025 album ‘The Overview’ as an Atmos disc just because I like all his other Atmos mixes (and earlier surround mixes). He is wildly prolific, especially among prog artists: Yes, Black Sabbath, Rush, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Gentle Giant, XTC, Roxy Music, also The Who (I’ve just received ‘Who Are You’), Robert Fripp’s ‘Exposure’. He's also opened an Atmos download site called Headphone Dust which may eventually overcome some of the problems with limited availability disc issues once it grows beyond his own material.
I should credit Giles Martin as well, for doing so many Beatles Atmos mixes which helped the format gain visibility; I’ve just been enjoying the SDE Blu-ray of his new Wings mixes, all in utterly uncompressed Dolby Atmos, and including even some neglected songs from ‘Back To The Egg’ and ‘London Town’. Joy!
Sometimes it’s like they’re targeting me personally, picking all my favourite albums for remixing. I was equally a-quiver about the long-delayed Atmos mix of ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ (I had to buy a whole box-set to get that one, but it’s a magnificent package) or the holy grail release of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s 1984 sonic orgasm ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’ – Atmos mix by Steven Wilson, OMFFFG, and worth every cent. I'm loving his instrumental Pleasuredome Atmos mixes too.
Classic after classic in Dolby Atmos. But I’ve been listening on disc only. Not on your ‘immersive’ headphones. From my trusty Oppo Blu-ray player they play into my Yamaha AV receiver, with upgraded left and right via stereo power amps, and often I dial my Atmos music down to 4.1.2, keeping my big left-right speakers in charge of the front soundstage without a separate centre to get in the way either tonally or positionally. This makes for a tight sweet spot, it's true, but I rarely invite visitors, so that’s just fine. I hold my Atmos speaker system close, almost like headphones.
And yet I never listen to Dolby Atmos on headphones. I have tried it many times, and the rear cues have never worked for me. Objects which should be at rear left or rear right have instead sounded merely very widely panned around the sides, so that there’s no real immersion, just a messed-up stereo presentation which sounds notably soft compared to the same track in stereo.
So soft that I’ve always thought this a clear downside to Atmos on headphones; the clarity of stereo can be so superior that I've been surprised by those who profess to pick the strangely dull Atmos headphone version by preference.
Until now.
Apple AirPod Max 2 arrives
So along come Apple’s new AirPod Max 2 headphones. I was very excited about these for a number of reasons. Firstly I am an everyday user of the original AirPod Max; when work is done and I go sit on my sunny deck, I wear the Apples, partly because they make everything sound fantastic, and partly because their ‘Ambience’ mode is brilliantly realistic, so that I can still pinpoint where to look in our big but famously toxic white cedar tree for a chirruping lorikeet or a calling currawong.
This is important to me, but perhaps not for you, which is why there are thousands of headphones available for thousands of different preferences; feel free. I must have reviewed 20+ rivals to the Apples since their arrival, and while I've referred to Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2 as a piece of perfection in design terms, and my heart was broken by packing up and returning the divine but costly open Meze Poets after a review last year, still nothing has made me shell out for shells that beat the Apples for my deck-dozing purposes. Which is why they look so filthy in the comparison pictures here.
Secondly I was excited by Apple’s announcement of Instant Translation through the new AirPod Max 2s. I wrote about this as a dream scenario not so long back – imagine visiting someone in Italy, say, sitting round a table with all their friends, and instead of everybody kindly switching to English so you can join in, you just wear headphones which translate everything instantly.
It blows my mind that this kind of AI-augmented ‘Headphone 3.0’ functionality is already possible – or something like it. Sadly, my collection of two MacBooks, a Mac Mini, an iPad and two iPhones had nothing quite up-to-date enough to test this Apple Intelligence functionality (iPhones 15 Pro or up required). Experiencing that miracle will have to wait until I can persuade some foreign -anguage speakers with recent iPhones to come visit.
Same same but better Atmos?
But for music, then, how much more amazing can the new Max 2s be than the old ones? To be honest, not much. Just as they look identical to the old Maxes, and come in the same peculiar non-protective case which looks like a bra from the front and a butt from behind, they also sound extremely similar. I would agree with the review from my UK WHF colleagues that it’s disappointing overall that the new Apple headphones simply aren’t more different to the old Apple headphones.
But then it’s kinda hard to complain too much about that, since the originals still sound as good or better to me than anything else in the market near the price, especially via Bluetooth.
That lack of change was in stereo, however. When I tried some Atmos music, suddenly it worked. The Flaming Lips’ album ‘Yoshimi Battles the PInk Robots’ is surely the best Atmos album mix yet released, and the track All We Have Is Now begins with electric piano in the back right channel, main vocal in the back left, and nothing at the front at all. That’s precisely what the Apple AirPod Max 2s delivered. Track after track came through with the elements in the same places as I had heard through the speaker system. Headphone Atmos works!
I have a notion that part of this success is precisely because I had heard these tracks on the speaker system, so I knew exactly what to expect, in terms of what should be where. I am now well acquainted with the details of dozens of Atmos albums heard on speakers, and that likely helps my brain accept positional cues even if they come less distinctly from the headphones.
But I did go back to my original Apple headphones to check, and the Atmos there was not as effective; things sounded softer, potentially through age and use, but potentially through the better chip in the new model. Soft signals in Atmos will especially degrade positional cues, I’d guess.
One other difference was that I let Apple use my phone to image my ears, to personalise the head-related transfer function used in Atmos decoding, so the positional cues may be more usefully and personally delivered. Maybe.
Plus here I could play in Atmos via USB-C; my original Apple headphones were the Lightning-socketed type so I’ve never experienced the cabled listening option that came with the USB-C updated version of the originals. Playing from my MacBook via USB-C it proved a little hard to stop the MacBook using the Bluetooth path (turning off Bluetooth entirely was quicker than trying to persuade the sound settings to switch and stick). But the clarity of lossless stereo music via USB-C was thrilling, and the Atmos imaging was still further improved. It’s possible, therefore, that the previous USB-C version of the AirPods Max might perform equally well as the new Max 2s in this regard.
Two important numbers
Mind you, the Apples’ Atmos performance even via cable is far from lossless,. As noted, Blu-ray disc-based Atmos can use bit-rates of potentially 4500 to 8000kbps.
There are two numbers I’d dearly love to have from Apple (I will ask them, and will add the answers here if they or anyone else can offer firm facts).
Firstly, what is the maximum bit-rate at which Apple streams Atmos spatial audio? The rate I'd get if I put my iPhone or MacBook on its Atmos and maximum quality settings and then play to the headphones via the USB-C cable?
I’m guessing this would be the same ~768kbps at which Apple serves Atmos to the AppleTV 4K, because that’s what their servers provide. Yet the USB-C connection to the headphones could now deliver higher than that. It can do lossless 24-bit/48kHz stereo , which requires native 2304kbps, so perhaps 1200kbps when losslessly encoded. If there’s room through the USB-C cable for that, then there's room for much better Atmos than 768kbps.
Secondly, what bit-rate is used when listening to Atmos to the AirPod Max 2 headphones via Bluetooth, rather than the cable?
I fear it may still be bottle-necked through the 256k AAC Bluetooth codec to which Apple restricts its headphones (and even more incomprehensibly much of its AirPlay ecosystem delivery).
And if Bluetooth Atmos is still going through the pipe at 256kbps AAC to the AirPod Max 2, the compression factor rises to a whacking 20-to-1 or thereabouts. So no wonder that Atmos music via Bluetooth has sounded so soft.
It’s all the more remarkable, then, that the new Apple headphones do a better job, despite what may be the same limitations. I am now genuinely converted to Atmos headphone listening on the new Apple AirPod Max 2, at least via USB-C. In fact I fully recommended it, though perhaps still as an alternative to lossless stereo listening, rather than a permanent replacement.
I’m still working out if I can get the genuine lossless Atmos data from my Blu-rays through to the new headphones via USB-C somehow. I think I'll have to connect an external BD disc drive to my MacBook somehow. More on that if and when it works.
Meanwhile if Apple would only enlarge its Bluetooth pipe to encompass the full 768k Atmos stream, then we could enjoy it all wirelessly as best as possible. Better still, they could raise the Atmos stream quality from the servers to reduce compression and improve every way to play it. That’s the dream, and Apple might one day achieve some of it via a simple firmware update to allow better Bluetooth.
I hope they do. It would save me a fortune in shipping all these Atmos Blu-rays over from the UK.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
