- Dire Straits keyboardist/producer Guy Fletcher talks about mixing their albums in Dolby Atmos
- He says immersive mixing of the original recording sessions is “quite addictive” and often very emotional
- 3D sound can reveal details that were previously buried when designing 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 didn’t deliver 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 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 remains an extraordinary format”. But as he explains on LinkedIn, duplicating a stereo record for Atmos enables you to rediscover “the little things that are sacrificed along the way when you make a stereo record. The little details. The decisions that no one notices because they’re buried under more important 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 to do with matching the emotional impact,” as he says. That’s not what you hear. It’s what you feel.
What immersive sound delivers – and doesn’t quite deliver
I think Fletcher is right, and I want to compare audio to another art form: video games. I’ve been playing some very old favorites recently and am amused by how terrible the graphics are; in my memories these games were photorealistic as well as completely convincing. When these games are remastered to higher visual quality, they effectively allow me to play what I remembernot what i actually saw.
As Fletcher describes it, taking recordings for spatial sound does much the same. “The moment you start placing objects or building beds around the listener, the music seems to breathe and expand. Mix or bus compression suddenly seems quite pointless. Sounds are no longer confined to a flat line between two speakers. Instead, they occupy a living, sculptural environment with depth, height and dimension.”
It’s by no means perfect, because people listen to Atmos and other spatial audio on all kinds of hardware that can be suboptimal: headphones, soundbars, and a variety of speaker systems that don’t deliver the full experience.
“Creating extraordinary Atmos mixes is no longer an obstacle,” says Fletcher. “The real challenge is to ensure that the sense of space, scale and emotional impact that makes immersive mixing so exciting 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’ greatest hits album, Brothers in Armswhose original multi-tracks took him straight back to the recording studio in 1984. Although the album had previously been remastered for 5.1 sound, 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,” recalls Fletcher. “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 of a recording, but also the memories embedded within it. In that respect, 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 record industry is very good at remastering records as a quick buck, and there are plenty of famous records by major artists whose remasters drew howls of outrage. But when an album is treated with care, patience and, above all, a love for the original material, the transition to 3D can make songs sing even more beautifully.
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