Object-based surround sound formats like Dolby Atmos are about the best thing to happen to the home theater market in the last decade. Instead of being limited to two dimensions of sound, Dolby Atmos includes height information so movie makers can create a truly immersive surround sound experience. Whether in a premium movie theater, a high-end home theater or even a living room with a Dolby Atmos-enabled sound bar, movies have never sounded better. And now that experience is coming to music in Amazon's new Echo Studio speaker and Amazon Music HD service.
The Echo Studio ($199.99) is a new high-performance voice-enabled home speaker designed to replicate the three dimensional Dolby Atmos soundstage from a single speaker. So how do Amazon and Dolby manage to create a three dimensional sound field from a single speaker? Very carefully! The Echo Studio includes four different speaker drivers pointing to all sides and upward in order to create an expansive soundstage. The Echo Studio also features a powered bass driver for more extended bass response than many competitive speakers.
Dolby knows that most consumers are not interested in installing multiple speakers in a single room, just to get high quality surround sound. Not only do multi-speaker systems tend to be expensive, they're also complicated and can dominate a room's appearance. Dolby has worked with manufacturers in the past to get around this concern by using wall and ceiling reflections, as well as electronic processing to simulate sound coming from above, beside and behind the listener. These techniques are integral in the design of the Echo Studio.
But, assuming the Echo Studio can create a three dimensional sound stage, where will the actual Dolby Atmos content come from? That's where Amazon's new Amazon Music HD service comes in. Amazon Prime Customers already get a limited form of Amazon Music to listen to music on Amazon and Amazon-compatible speakers and devices. An upgraded version of this that allows access to more music from more devices is available called "Amazon Music Unlimited" for $9.99-$14.99/month. Now Amazon is offering an upgrade to Amazon Music called "Amazon Music HD" for $12.99-$19.99/month, depending on your plan. This service offers music in higher quality lossless and "HiRes Audio" formats, including a selection of music encoded in Dolby Atmos.
Universal Music Group is a launch partner, and will be delivering a number of titles to the service encoded in Dolby Atmos. We're assuming that these new Dolby Atmos-encoded music titles will also be available for playback on a full Dolby Atmos-enabled home theater system. We'd imagine that the customer would need an Amazon Fire TV stick or Fire TV Cube connected to their home theater system via HDMI in order to take full advantage of the Dolby Atmos-encoded music titles. Plus, of course, they'd be able to play them back on an Amazon Echo Studio speaker in the kitchen or dining room as well. According to Amazon, the Echo Studio will be able to wirelessly synch to an Amazon Fire TV device to play Dolby Digital or Dolby Atmos TV shows and movies through the Echo Studio as well.
As fans of surround sound music all the way back to the Quadrophonic days, through DVD-Audio and SACD, we're very interested to hear how things have progressed with Dolby Atmos in the music mix. But it looks like we'll have to wait a little longer. The Echo Studio is expected to begin shipping in early November and we're still piecing together the other details about home system compatibility. Stay tuned...
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