- Guy Fletcher, Dire Straits keyboardist/producer, publishes an article on mixing their albums in Dolby Atmos
- He says the immersive mixing of the original recording sessions is “pretty addictive” and often very moving.
- 3D audio can reveal details that were previously buried during stereo engineering
One of the things I love most about audio technology is how it can reveal things you’ve never heard before, either because they were buried in the mix or because your setup, speakers, or headphones weren’t providing all the details.
And according to Dire Straits keyboardist and producer Guy Fletcher, Dolby Atmos delivers revelation after revelation not only to music fans, but also to the musicians and producers who made the records in the first place.
The majority of records are made in stereo and, according to Fletcher, “stereo remains an extraordinary format.” But as he explains on LinkedIn, re-recording stereo for Atmos allows you to rediscover “the little things that are sacrificed along the way when you make a stereo recording. The little details. The decisions that no one notices because they’re buried under bigger decisions.”
Fletcher makes an intriguing claim. Taking a stereo recording and making it three-dimensional isn’t about making it sound the same; “it’s more about matching the emotional impact,” as he puts it. That’s not what you hear. This is how you feel.
What Immersive Audio Offers – and Doesn’t Quite Deliver
I think Fletcher is right and I’m going to compare audio to another art form: video games. I’ve been replaying some very old favorites recently and am amused by how terrible the graphics are; In my memories, these games were both photorealistic and absolutely convincing. When these games are remastered with higher visual quality, they actually allow me to play what I want. remembernot what I actually saw.
As Fletcher describes, converting recordings to spatial audio does much the same thing. “As soon as you start placing objects or building beds around the listener, the music seems to breathe and expand. Bus mixing or compression suddenly seems rather unnecessary. Sounds are no longer limited to a flat line between two speakers. Instead, they occupy a living, sculptural environment with depth, height and dimension.”
It’s not perfect by any means, because people listen to Atmos and other spatial audio on all sorts of different hardware that may be suboptimal: headphones, soundbars, and a range of speaker systems that don’t provide the full experience.
“Creating extraordinary Atmos mixes is no longer a barrier,” says Fletcher. “The real challenge is ensuring that the sense of space, scale and emotional impact that makes immersive mixing so exhilarating can be faithfully experienced by the vast majority of listeners who do not own a dedicated Atmos speaker system.
Fletcher describes the spatialization of Dire Straits’ hit album, Brothers in Armswhose original multitracks took him straight back to the recording studio in 1984. Although the album had already been remastered for 5.1 audio, the Atmos edition still required extensive detective work as well as careful restoration.
“The real challenge was respecting an album that has become ingrained in the lives of millions of listeners,” Fletcher recalls. “While 5.1 and Atmos share some similarities, Atmos offers a very different creative canvas. The challenge has never been technical, but rather emotional.”
For Fletcher, “Atmos has a curious ability to reveal not only the details of a recording, but also the memories embedded within it. In this respect, at its best, the spatial audio experience is as much about rediscovery as it is about technology.”
Of course, Atmos doesn’t guarantee that a mix is good: the recording industry is very good at remastering records to make a quick buck, and there are many famous records by major artists whose remasters have provoked howls of outrage. But when an album is approached with care, patience and, above all, love of the original material, the move to 3D can make the songs sing even more beautifully.
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