Listening to in Dolby Atmos Streaming, via Tidal/Apple/Amazon

[AudiophileStyle]

and Christina Aguilera's Stripped from 2002

This one has been out for a while and is one of the strangest immersive mixes I’ve heard. I thought the placement of her vocals was a mistake for the longest time, and I’m still not sure it isn’t.

 

[fredblue]

This one has been out for a while and is one of the strangest immersive mixes I’ve heard. I thought the placement of her vocals was a mistake for the longest time, and I’m still not sure it isn’t.

is there a song that's mixed more weirdly than others, or is it the whole album you feel they mucked up?

fwiw i just pulled up the tracks in Loopback now to see what's going on in each of the 12 channels i have available in my Atmos "Franken-Mac" (TM 😋 ) computer setup and it seems ok to me 🤷🏻‍♀️

a tad Rear heavy vocally on certain tracks maybe but nothing like that Rufus track ("Tell Me Something Good" i think it was?) that clearly had the channels wrongly assigned as that one felt all Back to Front 🤔

not always but often the rhythm section's predominantly in the Front L&R (sometimes it's only in the Front L&R), lead and harmony vocals are commonly found in the Centre and many of the same vocal parts along with other vocals seem to have been mixed at a lower level in both the Sides and at a higher level in the Rears.

the LFE is silent throughout from what i could make out and the Heights are a mixture of ambience on some songs and much more active on other tracks with effects and various vocal parts going on up there.

i think the thing i found most jarring was overall volume level varied too much from song to song, some tracks are noticeably lower level overall ("Fighter", "Cruz", "Get Mine, Get Yours") others are much louder by comparison ("Beautiful", "Keep On Singin' My Song").

i'm curious now, since it's a Sony release, how the decoded 360 Reality Audio pans out by comparison.. 🤔

 

[fredblue]

I appreciated the tips this week, too, but with or without comments, I always look forward to the weekend scroll through @fredblue's linkdumps. They unfailingly include tons of tracks & albums that would've gotten otherwise overlooked. Even if I end up hearing and/or liking only a fraction of them, they don't take that long to get through. And there's almost always at least one treasure that I wouldn't have found on my own. It's like the old days, spending an hour or two combing through the racks at the record store, and maybe coming up with a find, or maybe not. Still time well spent!

thank you my dear Prof 🤗

even if only 1 QQ member likes just 1 song i shared that makes it all worthwhile 💘

i like the term "linkdump"! 😜😍 i think i might like to take this opportunity however just to remind everyone i'm not a robot scraping tracks off the internet to then just unceremoniously dump them 🤖 or an overzealous record label plugging their wares with no care for the QQ community! 😜

i'm one of you guys! 😍 right from my binaural dummy head down to my twelve channel twinkle toes!! (12 toes?? umm.. that's Superfreak-y!! 🤪😳 )
i just happen to listen to oodles of tracks in Atmos in any given week and want to share the 'better' ones with you that i've been giving a go! 🥰

to post and share what i'm enjoying right now takes time out, even if it's just a list. in that spirit, it's unlikely i'll dump a load of duds on you fine folks as i've tried and tested them.. and it's not as if taking the gamble and adding tracks to your Apple Music Library will take up precious physical shelf space real estate, you can simply delete any or all of the tracks straight afterwards if they don't float your boat 😅🫡

if i had more time.. 🤔 or there were less releases.. unm no, that's definitely a bad thing! 😂 or if i just shared less, how about that! 💡 🤔 ah that's not my style! 👀 more is more, baby 😉😋 i'd love to be able to spout on about all the tracks i'm playing, just as i did back when i was hoovering up old Quads like there was no tomorrow and would wax lyrical here about my latest slab of wax in Quad -- but the Quad LPs amounted to a mere fraction of what's coming down the pipe in streaming Atmos, twas a trifling trickle compared to the nigh-insurmountable tsunami we're getting now!! that was Ship Ahoy now we're wooshing away on the crest of a knave, umm, i mean wave..!!! 💦😱😻

fwiw i fell down another curious Atmos in Wonderland rabbit hole of discovery over the weekend, so i have a mini dump more tracks to share with everyone... but i will keep them for the weekend when i hope to have more time to post some info beyond just the tracks themselves as i totally appreciate reams of track lists is dull dull dull and that's not what we're all about.

peace out and as always happy listening!✌️❤️☮️

 

[AudiophileStyle]

is there a song that's mixed more weirdly than others, or is it the whole album you feel they mucked up?

fwiw i just pulled up the tracks in Loopback now to see what's going on in each of the 12 channels i have available in my Atmos "Franken-Mac" (TM 😋 ) computer setup and it seems ok to me 🤷🏻‍♀️

a tad Rear heavy vocally on certain tracks maybe but nothing like that Rufus track ("Tell Me Something Good" i think it was?) that clearly had the channels wrongly assigned as that one felt all Back to Front 🤔

not always but often the rhythm section's predominantly in the Front L&R (sometimes it's only in the Front L&R), lead and harmony vocals are commonly found in the Centre and many of the same vocal parts along with other vocals seem to have been mixed at a lower level in both the Sides and at a higher level in the Rears.

the LFE is silent throughout from what i could make out and the Heights are a mixture of ambience on some songs and much more active on other tracks with effects and various vocal parts going on up there.

i think the thing i found most jarring was overall volume level varied too much from song to song, some tracks are noticeably lower level overall ("Fighter", "Cruz", "Get Mine, Get Yours") others are much louder by comparison ("Beautiful", "Keep On Singin' My Song").

i'm curious now, since it's a Sony release, how the decoded 360 Reality Audio pans out by comparison.. 🤔

The placement of her vocals is really strange to me. I respect all creative decisions and accept this is how somebody wanted it to sound, but it's strange to me.

On track 2, Can't Hold Us Down, her vocals seem to lean heavily towards the rear channels, while the drums and bass are several dB louder in the front left and right.

I had an Atmos mixing engineer over to my place and I played this for him. He thought the engineer was trying to place the main vocal at the listening position. He thought it was a bit strange as well.

I really like this album, but can't listen to the Atmos version because it's so strange and a bit disorienting.

 

[fredblue]

as we're all about sneak previews at QQ lately 😉😻 here's a glimpse of some Atmos tracks i unearthed over the weekend that i'll be putting through their paces this week.

among other goodies, there's some singles and an album from L.A. Electro trio Cheat Codes, a couple of albums from Canadian Pop prodigy Johnny Orlando, 3 albums from North Carolina Popster Reneé Rapp, some intimate Pop from Illinois' A J Mitchell and the new single from London Pop trio New Hope Club)

Links forthcoming at the weekend! ✌️🥳😋

 

[fredblue]

The placement of her vocals is really strange to me. I respect all creative decisions and accept this is how somebody wanted it to sound, but it's strange to me.

On track 2, Can't Hold Us Down, her vocals seem to lean heavily towards the rear channels, while the drums and bass are several dB louder in the front left and right.

I had an Atmos mixing engineer over to my place and I played this for him. He thought the engineer was trying to place the main vocal at the listening position. He thought it was a bit strange as well.

I really like this album, but can't listen to the Atmos version because it's so strange and a bit disorienting.

i agree with you, i also found some tracks mixed Rear heavy on the vocals but not all the songs are mixed like that, which makes me think it has to be as intended and not a mistake 🤔

that said, i eschew Audyssey MultEQ etc when listening to MultiCh Music, as i find that feature makes the Rears dominate the Surround soundfield 🤷🏻‍♀️

i'm sure if i were to engage Audyssey MultEQ for this one it'd sound like Christina's singing over my shoulder! 👀

just so long as she whispers sweet nothing's in my ears you won't hear me complaining.. but if it's all that yelling and screaming and riffing and oy oy oy!!! 😅🤣

ah.. i may just do that for fits and giggles 😜🤪 Audyssey = you're back in the game! 💅🤩

 

[~dave~~wave~]

I forget whether it was @fredblue or @~dave~~wave~ who posted this a week or so ago. Nice chill-out soulquarian jazz, great guestlist, better-than-average mix (which sounds more 5.1-y than Atmos-y). Cool jazz-funk cover of "Packt Like Sardines" and a really funny improvised talking blues with Esperanza Spalding.

I also appreciate when Apple Music occasionally adds "liner notes," especially when they run more than a sentence or two, like they did here:

When acclaimed pianist and composer Robert Glasper began amassing recordings from his now five-years-strong “Robtober” residency at New York City’s famed Blue Note jazz club, there was no plan beyond keeping a record of the magic that’s sure to unfold whenever Glasper’s friends and collaborators join him onstage. Had he been more prescient about curating a selection of these performances for a project like Keys to the City Volume One, he might have realized the treasure trove of material he was sitting on.

“It’s like five years [of recordings],” he tells Apple Music. “You got to think, it’s two sets each night for a whole month. And when I first started, I only had one day off, so I was doing six days a week the first few years. And so many people come in. I looked up the scheduling of who I had on the bill that the audience knew of—that’s one thing—but there were so many people that just popped up on us. So many of those kinds of moments.” In the end, Glasper chose nine standouts.

The set list runs the gamut of what audiences might encounter on a given night, with Glasper having selected performances of songs you’re unlikely to hear elsewhere. They include versions of The Roots’ “Step Into the Realm” featuring Black Thought, Outkast’s “Prototype” as sung by Norah Jones, a cover of Chick Corea’s “Paint the World” featuring Thundercat, a particularly dialed-in arrangement of Glasper’s early-career Mulgrew Miller tribute “One for Grew,” and an impossibly groovy revamp of Ready for the World’s “Love You Down” sung by the voice we hear on all three of Glasper’s 2024 Apple Music collaborative projects, Meshell Ndegeocello. “She’s an icon,” Glasper says. “And just one of the greatest artists, in my opinion, ever. I don’t think she gets as much flowers as she should.”

Keys to the City’s sole original composition, “Didn’t Find Nothing in My Blues Song Blues,” features improvised singing from Esperanza Spalding, and plays—with its lighthearted onstage banter and meandering storyline—as something Glasper says is exemplary of the Robtober vibe. “[It] shows the other side of us—the pure, unadulterated—just two personalities with their instruments, jazz cats,” he says. “It felt so cool, so natural. She was just like, ‘Hey, you want to do a blues?’ I was like, ‘Cool,’ and then we just started. We never rehearsed it. She didn’t know what she was going to say. That’s why I called it what she said, ‘Couldn’t Find Nothing in My Blues,’ because it was literally made up in the moment. Those are cool things, because it takes courage to put shit out that you didn’t plan.”