- Dire Straits keyboardist and producer Guy Fletcher posts about mixing his albums in Dolby Atmos
- He says the immersive mix of the original recording sessions is “quite addictive” and often very emotional.
- 3D audio can reveal details previously hidden when designed for stereo
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 is delivering revelation after revelation not only to music fans, but also to the musicians and producers who made the records in the first place.
Most records are made with stereo in mind, and according to Fletcher, “stereo is still an extraordinary format.” But as he explains on LinkedIn, redoing a stereo recording for Atmos allows you to rediscover “the little things that get sacrificed along the way when you make a stereo recording. The little details. The decisions that no one notices because they’re buried beneath bigger decisions.”
Fletcher makes an intriguing claim. Taking a stereo record 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. It’s not what you hear. It’s what you feel.
What immersive audio offers (and what it doesn’t)
I think Fletcher is right and I’m going to compare audio to another art form: video games. I’ve been replaying some of my old favorites recently and am amused by how terrible the graphics are; In my memories, those games were photorealistic and absolutely attractive. When those games are remastered with higher visual quality, they allow me to play what I like. remembernot what I really saw.
As Fletcher describes it, converting recordings to spatial audio does much the same thing. “The moment you start placing objects or building beds around the listener, the music seems to breathe and expand. Bus mixing or compression suddenly seems quite pointless. 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 kinds of different hardware that may not be optimal: headphones, sound bars, and a variety of speaker systems that don’t provide the full experience.
“Creating extraordinary Atmos mixes is no longer an obstacle,” 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’ most successful album, brothers in armswhose multiple original tracks took him straight back to the recording studio in 1984. Although the album had previously been remastered for 5.1 audio, the Atmos edition still required extensive detective work as well as painstaking restoration.
“The real challenge was respecting an album that has been woven into 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 was never technical: the challenge was emotional.”
For Fletcher, “Atmos has a curious ability to reveal not only the details within a recording, but also the memories embedded within it. In that sense, 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 will be good: the record industry is very good at remastering records to make a quick buck, and there are many famous records by great artists whose remasters caused howls of outrage. But when an album is approached with care, patience, and, above all, love for the source material, the move to 3D can make songs sing even more beautifully.
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