Lots of back catalog work for major artists, and current upper mid level and top level artists seem to be doing Atmos “just because” with varying degrees of success but I have yet to hear any normal people mention its existence, let alone say it’s great, or even good. There is definitely work in Atmos for those who want it right now. I have yet to sit in a nice Atmos room and hear something which I’m sure is more compelling but how many end users will? Soundbars, consumer setups, and headphones can only do so much and I’m not convinced it’s going to make the format essential for the musical working class, which is the majority of my client base.

In fact, my thoughts on Atmos is that it usually sounds weird, weak, and not as exciting or direct as stereo. Something WaveLab’s Reference Tracks would be very useful for dialing in easily and quickly.Įven though I have yet to hear a music album that sounds so good in Dolby Atmos that I want to hear it again in Dolby Atmos on Apple’s AirPods Pro and/or AirPods Max which is probably the upper end of what the average consumer will hear it on right now, and even though I have had ZERO clients ask me about doing an ATMOS master for their project, and have more stereo mastering work than I can currently handle, I do think that some consideration for Atmos must be had. He also commented how the ATMOS version has to be within a certain degree of sameness as far as song spacing compared to the official release. Michael made some interesting comments about things like how hard (or impossible) it currently is to do gapless album masters for ATMOS because for the time during that crossfade, the already high number of channels/objects is doubled. Yes, there are very few standards in place for this format but with guys like Michael and Pete Lyman who currently do a lot of immersive/Atmos work and are WaveLab users, that’s a great resource to potentially tap and get it sorted out sooner than later. This is something that WaveLab is in position to not only do, but be the first. He talks about some of the challenges he and other immersive mastering engineers face due to the lack of assembly tools for that format.

Dolby atmos demo disk mastering