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

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Huh! Wonder if this is a new mix or if those compilations they’ve done AI up mixes had enough to round this out.

Edit: to my untrained ears it sounds slightly more discrete than your typical AI upmix, but also not especially great overall

I noticed the other day that while ‘Holland’ shows as Atmos when you search it, California Saga is not. It is Lossless or HR. It was Atmos before. I also note most of my saved Atmos Beach Boys albums prior to ‘Pet Sounds’ have disappeared. What a mess!

In the meantime I’ve accidentally deleted all my historic Beach Boys tracks in my library trying to check. Will have to start again.

Hopefully they are going to fix and repost them all.

I note that the early albums from ‘Surfing USA’ to ‘All Summer Long’ are in Atmos on Tidal but I can’t find any of these on Apple Music anymore. The in-between albums up to ‘Pet Sounds’ are missing on both.

I note all The Beach Boys Immersive mixes, with ‘The Sounds Of Summer’ are credited on Tidal to Mark Linnet, The Beach Boys long time remixer, with the exception of the excellent ‘Pet Sounds’ which is credited to Giles Martin. This includes the early albums plus ‘Sunflower’ and ‘Surf’s Up’ which appeared today. I can’t find ‘Holland’ or anything from it on Tidal— whoops...found them under Sail On Sailor 1972. I don’t think Mark Linnet does AI mixes. He did do the 1997 Box Set ‘Pet Sounds’ with the first proper stereo mix and the Circa 2001 ‘Pet Sounds’ DVD-Audio 5.1.

'Sunflower' and 'Surf's Up' do sound a bit weird to me.

Thats what I get for replacing an Amp in one of my setups that I can see the Atmos display. Something I can’t see on the others.
 
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St. Vincent - All Born Screaming


It's just a coincidence that I've listened to the Atmos mix of this album (published several months ago) for the first time on the day after the released the Spanish version of it, but hey, there you go anyway.

This is a bit frustrating. This music calls for an aggressive, bold Atmos mix, and it's exactly the opposite. Very, very front centric. It is discrete, but the sounds coming from the channels other than FL and FR are really shy most of the time, and the center speaker is basically silent. I'd compare this mix to Marillion's Script for a Jester's Tear, Devin Townsend's Powernerd or Riverside's ID.Entity (Devin's being probably the best of the four), at least when it comes to my personal impressions about it. It's like, yeah, sounds nice, and occasionally it gets it right, but most of the time you can't help wondering "where's the surround content?". Also, like those, it seems a bit inconsistent with the mixing choices, as if the mixing engineer only decided to go beyond the stereo soundfield at a few random times. It sounds great when they did, so why not always like that? All in all, frustrating. This could have been absolutely epic, and it ended up being merely good at best. At least, it sounds noticeably more dynamic than the stereo mix.

Wonder if the Spanish version has been mixed differently? Not holding my breath, but I'll check it out soon (being Spanish myself, I'm also curious about her performance there).

I've heard that her previous album Daddy's Home has a superb Atmos mix, which I haven't heard yet. But I don't like that album nearly as much as All Born Screaming, which is honestly one of my favorite releases of the last few years.
 
Daddy's Home
Yes, it is a much better mix than ABS. I had high hopes mix wise and was left disappointed. I will still listen because she is so great but I can't imagine what happened if the new album had the same person at the mix controls.
 
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