[AlexReverberi]

Talking about Herts that hurt your wallet, who is working in Atmos here?

[Tim Halligan]

Not me.

After doing a few projects in 5.1 I'm avoiding that too.

Cheers,
Tim

[studiotan]

Talking about Herts that hurt your wallet, who is working in Atmos here?

I know Mikko Raita is doing a ton of them. Hope he signs up.

[AlexReverberi]

Not me.

After doing a few projects in 5.1 I'm avoiding that too.

Cheers,
Tim

yeah fuck surround. Gladly Atmos is scalable  and there's a big hype around it.
I just did my first 3 mixes for a client, all seems well. As I'm planning to move to Nashville i'm also planning how to build an Atmos home studio on a budget in my future home. because yeah, I dont have $50,000 to spend for a 7.1.4 Focal system

[e-cue]

I’m turning in Atmos and 360RA files semi reg. The 360 thing mainly because a lot of my clients are under the Sony umbrella and it’s their tech and all that.

Running PT, using Lynx convertors, more as interface devices since I’m going digitally into a Trinnov system (and upgrade from the Grace 908 which I keep on stand by, and is a great unit). I love the Trinnov system (especially when I dial back it’s heavy handedness on the low end processing) and it works well for me. These all feed PMC monitors (including sub) for playback- a personal pref like all monitors. 9.1.4 for short, but my lfe can technically do 2 channels, and I’m multing to a tactile transducer system I tend to kick on with attended sessions to exaggerate the impact respectfully.

Some engineers are known to brush the Atmos work off as an after throught and have their assistants knock them out, and charge $500 per. Some even using wrappers. At the lowest, I’ll charge $1k for Dolby and 360RA. Usually I charge $1.5k for both. Say you are slated to mix at least 4 records with 15 songs on a major, and they can either hire you for immersive or Battery or Josh Gudwin’s team, etc... You can do some math and see if it’s worth it. If you aren’t presented with this work/funds, I’d avoid it or at least attempt some poor mans version of it.

I enjoy the format for the most part. I hate the (well known) tech issues with the format, and the lack of being about to do everything within my DAW of choice without back and forthing through the renderer. I loathe the way my mixes end up sounding different on Apple Airpod Maxs. Part of this being apple’s proprietary codec, and a lot in the mystery of user settings when doing playback through them.

[Chris Lambrechts]

I’ve been playing with it mostly. Actually love the format for the way they have ‘nailed’ the downmix translations.

I firmly believe that’s where it’s sustainability for the future will depend on.
Hearing more and more ‘high end’ mixes being done in atmos only under the ‘the stereo downmix is as good as a dedicated stereo mix would be’ pretention and THAT I find intriguing.

I’ve only done stereo upmixes with stems or AI processing from a commercial pov but am experimenting on my own time a lot with objects vs beds and how they translate to binaural etc …

I’d be curious to see which one is going to be truly do inating the immersive format bttle.

Apple does what apple does but that’s already mainly based on atmos
Tidal I think is like the swiss … neutral.

Eventually spotify will have to decide .,, I know … Sony etc … still. If to put money on it I’d go atmos ! Translation is key imo

Chris

[Skwaidu]

Talking about Herts that hurt your wallet, who is working in Atmos here?

I know Mikko Raita is doing a ton of them. Hope he signs up.

Not a ton - it's still slow in Finland. But yeah I've got a 9.1.6 Dynaudio setup (as cheap as possible, so old BM15A's and even older BM6 passives for the ceiling. I've mixed some film scores in Atmos and now trying to build up some Atmos Music work - basically a suitable project comes in, I try to sell doing an Atmos version as well, and sometimes they bite.

I do hope it picks up, doing the mixes is super fun. (Just mixing an "epic" pop/rock track in Atmos, and waiting to hear if next week's electronic/free jazz trio mix would get the label go ahead - we recorded it with Atmos in mind and it would work super well, tons of synths, guitar pedals, loopers etc in use)

---

Re: Spotify (The Quote button is broken btw?) - didn't they just tout their new LA HQ facility with an ATMOS STUDIO in it? That's a hint if anything... Also Apple Music apparently playlisting only songs that have an Atmos mix done as well.

FWIW I actually also switched to a Win 11 Pro Tools machine (gasp), really enjoying it, but getting shafted re: Atmos a bit. I'm keeping my old Mac Pro 5,1 to run the Renderer (although with the DAR 5.0 update, I can actually do a single machine Win workflow now as well, but it's super finicky so sticking to 2 machines for now).

I'm using a MTRX Studio with Dante, so i'm currently stuck with just 64 channels for beds and objects, and just 32 if I'm running the mix at 96k (which I often am), due to cheaping it out with DVS. It's not optimal, but passable.

[Tim Halligan]

Skwai said: "...we recorded it with Atmos in mind..."

Would I be right in thinking that Atmos - like any other format - works best when the project is tracked with that release format in mind?

Typically, it seems the record companies are jumping on the new craze in an effort to squeeze out some more revenue from their catalogues. I read recently - IIRC over at Terry Manning's place - that someone was working on an Atmos release of an old James Taylor record, and the instruction from the record company was to "just fly some stuff around" purely for the ooh-aah factor, and screw the original mix intent.

Cheers,
Tim

[David Aurora]

Skwai said: "...we recorded it with Atmos in mind..."

Would I be right in thinking that Atmos - like any other format - works best when the project is tracked with that release format in mind?

Typically, it seems the record companies are jumping on the new craze in an effort to squeeze out some more revenue from their catalogues. I read recently - IIRC over at Terry Manning's place - that someone was working on an Atmos release of an old James Taylor record, and the instruction from the record company was to "just fly some stuff around" purely for the ooh-aah factor, and screw the original mix intent.

Cheers,
Tim

Come on man, you can't tell me it wouldn't be hilarious to hear Fire and Rain with rain/telephone/plane crash noises flying around in all known dimensions. Fuck the original mix intent!

[Skwaidu]

Skwai said: "...we recorded it with Atmos in mind..."

Would I be right in thinking that Atmos - like any other format - works best when the project is tracked with that release format in mind?

Sure, or even has production and arrangement decisions done with surround / immersive in mind. One cool trick is to monitor tracking in quad, to get an easily manageable glimpse of how spatial positioning of musical elements and/or ambiences would work in the mix (I actually monitored the jazz thing in 7.1.2 as it was tracked in my own room, which I rarely do with ensembles due to the modest size of our recording spaces).

The Atmos remixes are often done out of stereo stems printed from the original st mix session, so that limits many options already (actually panning mono elements discretely or using multichannel reverbs well is harder if the stems are wet etc).

Although interesting and non-shit remixes *are* possible and there are many really impressive and good examples, but quite a bit of the "fly shit around" mentality around as well. Mr Big's "To Be With You" is one of the shittiest; During the end chorus choir section the lead voc adlibs are what feels like +8dB and flying around the room. Incredibly sad.