INNOVATION OF THE YEAR

This remarkable new tech has made a genuinely cinematic, three-dimensional listening experience available via your headphones

Apple Spatial Audio

It’s notoriously difficult to create surround sound, let alone Dolby Atmos, via two drivers that are right next to your ears. A huge amount of processing is required in order essentially to trick your brain into thinking the sound is coming from all around you. Even if a device succeeds in this regard, it can struggle to deliver the sense of distance that you get from a true surround-sound system and, worse, sound effects can take on a synthesised quality that undermines the immersive quality that the tech is designed to deliver.

That’s not the experience you get from Apple Spatial Audio. Play an Atmosintensive movie via an iphone or ipad and pop on a pair of Airpods Pro or, ideally, Airpods Max headphones, and it’s like being acoustically transported to a top-notch cinema.

Effects don’t come simply from the sides, behind and even above you; they come from specific points in threedimensional space. People often forget that Dolby Atmos isn’t simply about adding height to surround sound; it’s about creating a 3D soundscape into which effects are precisely placed. That’s what Apple’s Spatial Audio delivers, and all without making you aware of the vast amount of processing involved.

And that’s not even the really innovative bit, which is the integrated device- and head-tracking. With this, not only do you get an entirely convincing Atmos experience, but it remains locked to the screen as you move your head just as it would if you were listening ‘out loud’. You can move the iphone or ipad too, and the soundstage will move with it.

Amazingly, this cinematic experience was just the start. In May Apple added (along with Lossless Audio) Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos to Apple Music. This isn’t just 3D processing being applied to stereo music, but tracks that are mastered (or re-mastered) for Spatial Audio, with vocals and instruments that inhabit specific spots in a three-dimensional soundscape. It’s not like being at a gig, which is still, in most cases, a stereo affair – it’s something different. Essentially we’re talking about something that overcomes the loss of one type of atmosphere by adding one that’s completely different and hardly less striking.

Spatial Audio via Apple Music isn’t restricted to Apple’s own headphones – it can be enjoyed via wired and wireless headphones from any brand, as well as heard out loud via iphones, ipads, Macbooks and ‘proper’ Dolby Atmos setups that are using the Apple TV 4K as a source.

Is Spatial Audio going to kill stereo music? Probably not. And we wouldn’t want it to. Instead, it adds a different way to enjoy your favourite tracks and provides artists with the tools and impetus to create music in new and exciting ways. On the movies side, meanwhile, Spatial Audio makes a genuinely cinematic experience available via headphones for the very first time. In short, it’s very special technology.

“With head-tracking, not only do you get an entirely convincing Atmos experience, but it remains locked to the screen as you move your head”