In the early morning of March 9, Apple held the first conference of 2022. And in less than an hour, the new color iPhone 13 series, the new iPhone SE upgraded to A15, the iPad Air upgraded to M1, the Mac Studio that launched M1 Ultra, and the Studio Display with built-in A13 were launched in one go.
Among these new products, the most "inconspicuous" may be Studio Display. After all, as a quasi-professional monitor product, it does not have the wide audience of the iPhone 13 series and the new iPhone SE, nor does it have such a terrifying chip and performance configuration as the iPad Air or Mac Studio.
But if you have seen our Product Analysis of Sanyi Life for this conference, you will know that Studio Display is actually a fairly competitive product. In fact, it's not just a 27-inch, 5K resolution HDR600 display, apple also equipped it with a 12-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera, and a six-unit Dolby Atmos speaker system that claims to be "the strongest in its class".
I don't know if you have noticed that our previous evaluation of Studio Display is actually a little unreasonable. Because we once said, "At the same price point as it, it's almost impossible to buy a 5K resolution HDR600 monitor, plus a 12-megapixel high-end webcam, plus a Dolby Atmos SoundBar."
But in fact, in this sentence, in fact, there is no need to add the word "almost". Because to date, no loudspeaker or SoundBar product for personal computers has supported Dolby Atmos. So it's not about money at all, it's about not being able to buy it.
Why is that? First of all you need to know what is "panoramic sound"
Speaking of "Dolby Atmos," many of your friends may feel for the first time that it's just a more advanced surround sound technology. But in fact this perception is completely wrong, "panoramic sound" and "surround sound" are completely different things, and the relationship between them is a bit as delicate as the question of "chicken or egg first".
Imagine a scene where you sit in the middle of the room surrounded by a circle of speakers, and the speaker on the right side of your body rings out, then the right rear, then the rear, and then the rear, and you will "feel" that the sound source seems to move from the right side of your body to the back.
But in fact, the sound played by these speakers may be completely recorded separately, or it may be exactly the same sound. It's just that because of the difference in speaker position, it gives you the illusion that "the same sound source has moved", which is called surround sound. It is the result of multi-channel recording, and then use the speaker to take turns to create a "sense of surround". That is, it is a kind of "recorded audio".
Apple Logic Pro's Dolby Atmos interface allows you to see where you need to manually specify the source instead of the speaker
However, the production and playback logic of "Panoramic Sound" is completely opposite. When a film and television editor wants to create a video containing Dolby Atmos, they first have to plot "the trajectory of a sound source in a certain time period" in a special software with approximate 3D modeling steps.
After that, Dolby Atmos automatically calculates the reasonable volume and reverberation level of each speaker when playing the source based on the position of the source. In conclusion, you will feel that the sense of positioning presented by the "panoramic sound" is far stronger than the general surround sound, and you can even hear how large and fast the different sound sources have moved at each minute and moment. This is because Panoramic Sound is not based entirely on multichannel recording, but is the latest achievement in "computational audio" technology.
The characteristics of Dolby Atmos mean it pays more attention to the "sense of localization" of the audio
Don't you think it's amazing? However, this mechanism of "first having the sound source move the parameters relative to the position of the listener, and then using calculations rather than recordings to generate a precise audio change effect" determines that Dolby Atmos actually has a very, very large limitation: it requires that a relatively constant position relationship must be maintained between the sounding device and the user, otherwise, the effect of "atmos" will be greatly reduced.
Pc speaker position with volume limitations, making it difficult to be compatible with "Panoramic Sound"
After understanding the most fundamental difference between "atmos" and "surround sound", let's look at the various equipment equipped with "Dolby Atmos" technology on the market, which is actually very easy to understand.
For example, you will find that many mobile phones, laptops and TV speakers support the "panoramic sound" function. This is because their body size is determined at the time of design, so the position and volume of all the speakers on the device have also been carefully calculated. In addition, when such equipment is used, the distance between the user and the device itself will not be too far off, so the "panoramic sound" effect is actually relatively easy to guarantee.
For example, in some high-end speaker combinations in the living room, or on the large-size SoundBar for the living room, you will also see support for "Dolby Atmos". But if you have used these devices, you will find that they often need to use a special tuning microphone or a supporting APP on the mobile phone to perform an operation called "calibration" when installing and configuring. The purpose of the calibration is actually to tell the atmos decoder what is a relative position relationship between your sofa and each speaker and each speaker, and only after this step can the effect calculation of "Dolby Atmos" be carried out normally.
"Atmos" and "Atmos" are not the same thing
In addition, some friends may say, "Don't my headphones also support Dolby Atmos, how come it's not so complicated?" In fact, there are "pits" in this. On the one hand, the vast majority of headphones themselves do not actually support the Dolby Atmos multichannel calculus, they only support a kind of surround sound called "Dolby Atmos", which is not the same thing as true atmos.
JVC's true Dolby Atmos headphones, the one below is its matching decoder and panoramic operation unit
On the other hand, the few headphones on the market that can actually play back the "Dolby Atmos" cinema effect will find that they also have a special configuration process before use, requiring the shape of the binaural ears to be photographed and analyzed with a mobile phone. This step is actually the same as the calibration of the home theater, but it is to optimize the localization calculation effect of the panoramic sound by analyzing the shape of your pinna and ear canal, which is the so-called process of obtaining HRTF (head correlation transfer function).
Tv speakers of the same brand that support panoramic sound are several times higher in size and cost than those that do not support panoramic sound
Understanding the above truths, we will look at the mainstream PC multimedia speakers and find that whether it is a traditional 2.0 bookshelf box, 2.1, or a 5.1 multi-channel speaker, or a desktop-level SoundBar that has been popular in recent years, this type of product is a large random placement, and it is difficult to ensure that there is enough spacing and accurate position relationship between the speaker units from the shape. The second is that due to cost factors, the vast majority of mainstream PC speakers are unlikely to be equipped with complex tuning and calibration equipment like professional home theater or high-end cinema headphones.
Dolby Atmos has not been able to be used in PC game production to date, which has led to its lack of popularity in the pc audio space
Perhaps because of this, although 10 years have passed since the release of Dolby Atmos, it can be seen from the official website of Dolby that they have never thought about promoting "Atmos" to the PC market. In fact, Dolby has not yet launched a panoramic sound production solution for any PC game, but has focused on promoting it as a video sound standard. To some extent, this has also made a "contribution" to The Dolby Atmos' "cold" situation in the mobile device, television and cinema fields, but only in the personal computer, especially the personal computer speaker market.
【The picture of this article comes from the network】