Why I Turned off Head Tracking for Spatial Audio
In some instances, it’s just silly
Earlier this year, Apple introduced Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos for selected tracks in the Apple Music library.
It’s super-impressive stuff — if a little weird when applied to music.
In essence, Dolby Atmos creates the effect of watching a movie or listening to music in a theatre or concert hall, respectively. It adds virtual height and extra width to the soundstage and enables engineers to project sounds at you from several angles.
Even though you can experience Spatial Audio by itself, Apple has designed it to work best with Dolby Atmos. Whereas the latter delivers the room-filling, multi-directional sound, Spatial Audio places you virtually inside that room. In theory, this enables you to ‘move around’ and experience the effect that has on the sound — just like being physically in the room.
And that’s where it all goes a bit wrong. It’s also why I turned off head tracking in Spatial Audio for music.
