Apple Music Debuts New Live Music Series with Spatial Audio

Peter_Brosdahl

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Apple Music has debuted Apple Music Sessions which is offering exclusive live music streamed in the spatial audio format. The new series launched with performances from Carrie...

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I had a free Music trial for a bit and tried out Spatial.

It was neat on my home theater, but not groundbreaking in my opinion, and there wasn't a ton of it to make use of. It did use Dolby Atmos if I recall correctly (playing back through an Apple TV 4K). Maybe it's more impactful if you have headphones on - but then you lose the entire body experience that you gain when sitting in front of good speakers....

In the end, I didn't chose to keep the service. Even though I'm fairly invested in Apple hardware, it wasn't impactful enough to overcome the convenience of having Spotify on absolutely everything and everywhere.
 
Brian_B said:
It was neat on my home theater, but not groundbreaking in my opinion, and there wasn't a ton of it to make use of.
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I collect a lot of Hi-res audio including some of the 5.1 24/96 remasters that come out for various things and even with a nice surround sound setup that can be an issue. I feel like there's a disconnect between the sound engineers and artists with the listeners. Those of us with the systems are not investing because we want to hear everything on a stage crammed onto the same two speakers and then the clapping of hands everywhere else. I've never understood why they don't make more use of the soundscape to spread out the other instruments to the other channels. I do hear it sometimes but often will just switch any receiver I have over to the all-channel stereo, which I know defeats the purpose, but at least lets the speakers handle the duty of reproducing the sound via what each can do.

I don't have any Apple services so I won't be checking this out anytime soon but I'm glad they are at least giving it a shot. I've been waiting for some 4K live concerts with Atmos but so far none of the artists I like have put out anything and meanwhile, the last gen of DTS HD MA was a mixed bag. Great sample and bit rates but the mixes mostly seemed underwhelming.
 
Peter_Brosdahl said:
I do hear it sometimes but often will just switch any receiver I have over to the all-channel stereo, which I know defeats the purpose, but at least lets the speakers handle the duty of reproducing the sound via what each can do.
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I know it's cheating, but honestly, all-surround mode sounds more interesting sonically than most spatial audio tracks did.
 
DrezKill said:
In the 90s, I figured by the time 2020 rolled around, stereo music would give way to multi-channel surround sound music. Well 90s me, you figured wrong.

Anyone remember these?
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I mostly missed the SACD train but have an extensive library of DVD-A from Led Zeppelin to Jethro Tull, Queen, and a few others that I can't remember off the top of my head. It's a great format. I love it, except for the unimaginative mixdowns but I use DVD Audio Ripper to rip them to 2-channel hi-res FLAC files for my tablet and receiver HDD. I do the same for any BD or DVD's that happen to have hi-res audio or at least 24-bit/48 KHz.
 
I still have some DTS concert DVD's that are a blast to listen to/watch sometimes.
 
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