This isn't an issue for physical speakers, including the six-speaker array on the new MacBook Pros. This is because in everyday life we can cock our ears to help locate where a sound is coming from, especially when it's from behind us.
"The music comes from all around you and sounds incredible."Īpple's Tim Cook delivering the WWDC 21 keynote.Īt CNET we've tried countless technologies that attempt to create surround sound with stereo headphones - Dolby Headphone, DTS Headphone:X and so on - but the effect evaporates as soon as you move your head. "Listening to a song in Dolby Atmos is like magic," Oliver Schusser, vice president of Apple Music and Beats, said in a news release in May. Apple says that Dolby Atmos mixes on its Music service offer a better experience than lossless music alone.
Atmos is a surround-sound standard used both in movie theaters and the home, and more recently has been used to remix albums.ĭolby Atmos Music, as used by Apple Music, is one of two competing formats providing surround and height effects for streaming tunes, while its competitor is Sony's 360 Reality Audio. While the technology that will power FaceTime calls is different, the spatial audio portion of Apple Music and streaming movies comes courtesy of Dolby Atmos. Apple first introduced spatial audio on its AirPods Pro earbuds in 2020, and the company is now expanding the capabilities of other devices in the range. Spatial audio is Apple's term for a collection of audio technologies that bring 360-degree effects to video calls, movies and remixed music.