Sonos Announces New 'Era' Speakers and Apple Music Spatial Audio Support

Does anyone else find spatial audio for music to be a bit lacking? It’s amazing for movies. But every time I try and listen to Atmos music on my Sonos soundbars or AirPods, I end up turning it off and going back to regular stereo.

Does anyone else find spatial audio for music to be a bit lacking? It’s amazing for movies. But every time I try and listen to Atmos music on my Sonos soundbars or AirPods, I end up turning it off and going back to regular stereo.

It really depends on the album. There are a lot that are not mixed well.... most likely auto-generated Spatial or something. But there are some albums that sound absolutely amazing. Some of my favorites:


* Rumors - Fleetwood Mac
* Thriller - Michael Jackson
* Pyromania - Def Leppard
* Various Beatles albums

For the younger crowd, I've stumbled across various tracks by The Weekend, Billie Elish (sp?), etc. That sound really neat.

But as mentioned, there are many albums that did Spatial a disservice (I'm looking at you, Faith no More - Epic).

Edit: Just to clarify - I have the Arc, Sub and two Ones in my setup.

Does anyone else find spatial audio for music to be a bit lacking? It’s amazing for movies. But every time I try and listen to Atmos music on my Sonos soundbars or AirPods, I end up turning it off and going back to regular stereo.

Select stuff explicitly made for it (not faux created after the fact like turning mono & stereo recordings into it) can be interesting/impressive. For example, the Beatles Love soundtrack does seem a bit "more" in spatial than stereo to my ears.

I suspect part of the problem is that just about every way we've ever listened to music involves it coming from a direction (stage/hall/stereo speakers out front) or perhaps just left & right stereo (when in headphones). Spatial is conceptually trying to put the audience somewhere in between the musicians, as if instead of seated in an audience with the orchestra ahead of you, you've taken position in among the orchestra with some of them in positions all around you.

We generally do NOT already know the sounds of that kind of audio at all. Instead we are accustomed to it in stereo at best coming from a single direction. Even in hifi setups that would previously fake it with a setting like "concert hall" most of that immersion would make the virtual space seem larger by sending a little echo out to other speakers, etc.

So now the game is "faking it" by taking recordings originally mixed as stereo and digitally faking surround or- in some cases- choices are being made to go back to the individual tracks to make a new surround sound mix (which- per established familiarity- music noticeably changes and may get some negative bias because it sounds different than the version we know so well).

I suspect as time passes and brand new recordings are created explicitly to take advantage of it, it might gain some extra steam and even sound BETTER to our ears than stereo. If you hear new creations for the first time in it, you can't have previous bias/familiarity to how it sounds in stereo. Getting acquainted with brand new music this way may make it seem like the stereo version is "missing something." For example, flip this to movies with great surround sound audio. When you try to watch the same movie in only stereo or only mono, it is VERY noticeable (and generally a lessened experience).

Once upon a time all recorded audio was mono and people had to adjust or rebel against the crazy idea of 2 channel stereo with some sound more left than right and vice versa. Our initial reaction to this is probably like that. Step forward 10 or 20 years and perhaps we'll be ridiculing "old-fashioned" stereo because "everything can only sound like it's coming from one direction and only left & right."

But HomePods are so expensive!
/s

Would be really nice to be able to set these speakers as "default" via apple tv like the homepod.

Ironically, as a user of both multiple HomePods and Sonos speakers, I think Sonos uniquely works best with Apple. The calibration (TruePlay) requires an Apple device. Sonos has also been quite direct in wanting Siri on their speakers. I am confident that Apple is the holdup here.

I have removed Alexa from my home for a variety of reasons. I think it's nice that Sonos has added their own Hey Sonos service to the speakers. Would I prefer Siri? Absolutely! But I will say that for the specific purpose of controlling music, Hey Sonos has advantages, such as the ability to easily skip around a track.

And as someone who has the option to control multi-room music through Apple Music (Sonos has AirPlay2) and the Sonos app, I prefer using the Sonos app.