If you subscribe to Apple Music and you own a pair of AirPods (or if you own a pair of Beats headphones with an Apple H1 or W1 chip in it), now is the time to listen to some music. Spatial music is now available in Apple Music (at no additional cost) which means that songs produced or remastered for Dolby Atmos can now be streamed through Apple Music. And these songs sound great.
I wrote about spatial audio a few weeks ago in this post. But as the old saying goes (perhaps first said by Martin Mull), writing about music like dancing about architecture. To really understand what spatial audio is about, you need to hear it yourself. And now you can.
Apple has created some playlists in which all of the songs feature Dolby Atmos, and this is a great way to begin listening to spatial audio. For example, the primary list is called Made for Spatial Audio and it includes over 100 songs from every different genre of music.
You should start with the first track, Marvin Gaye: From Mono to Stereo to Spatial, because Zane Lowe of Apple starts to play the classic song What's Going On in the original mono, then switches to stereo, and finally switches to Dolby Atmos. This makes it easy to appreciate how much better stereo is than mono and how much better Dolby Atmos is than stereo. You can also hear Zone Lowe do something similar with this track for the song Save Your Tears by The Weeknd.
Apple also created playlists featuring spatial audio for the genres of Hits, Pop, Hip-Hop, Country, Rock, Classical, and Jazz.
How much of a difference does spatial audio make? It depends. I noticed that for some older songs that I've listened to countless times, such as Here Comes the Sun by The Beatles, I Want You Back by the Jackson 5, and The Gambler by Kenny Rogers, the difference was substantial. I've been listening to those songs in stereo for so many years that hearing them in Dolby Atmos for the first time was pretty stunning. The music seems much more immersive than I've ever experienced in the past. I can more easily pick out different instruments as if they are in specific locations around me — and for the song The Gambler, it was like I've never heard each string of the guitar so clearly. For modern songs that are already heavily produced to sound great in stereo, the Dolby Atmos version still sounded better, but the difference was less dramatic to me. But Dolby Atmos was always an improvement.
I tested the songs using my iPhone 12 Pro and my AirPods Pro. I also asked my wife to check it out, and she used her iPhone SE (second generation) and her AirPods (I believe the first generation). She agreed that Dolby Atmos sounded better than stereo, but she also said that she doesn't normally pay that much attention to differences in audio quality, and thus she said that she wouldn't want to pay extra for it. Fortunately, Apple isn't charging extra for spatial audio. It is just a new feature of an Apple Music subscription.
Along with spatial audio, Apple also added the (optional) ability to download songs in a lossless format, if you turn that on in the Settings app. Much as I predicted a few weeks ago, to my ears, I didn't notice any difference with lossless audio. So after trying it for a while, I just turned it off to avoid the substantial increase in data streaming required for lossless audio. If you can appreciate the difference of lossless audio, then you have much better hearing than I do. But most anyone can appreciate the clear, immersive, three-dimensional sound of spatial audio.
If you subscribe to Apple Music, you should absolutely check out spatial audio for a new way to listen to music. If you don't, now you have another reason to check out the service.
[UPDATE 6/10: Alex Castro of The Verge wrote an excellent article on Spatial Audio and I recommend that you read it. He identifies songs that sound great. He also points out some songs that were remixed poorly and sound worse. He also notes that you don't need AirPods to turn on Spatial Audio, which I did not know, although your results may vary. And he provides a great tip for using the Control Center to quickly switch between the Dolby Atmos and stereo versions of a song so that you can easily do your own A/B test and decide what you think.]
