With Dolby’s Atmos sound system, you’ll hear music on steroids. But you’ll have to rebuy all your favourite albums to match the format

The kick-drum is right down on the floor in front of me. There are guitarists to the right and left, keyboards somewhere in between, a voice way up high, and percussion effects coming from every height and every angle.

Hidden in the backstreets of North Sydney, it’s an audio wonderland, and I’m hearing music more clearly than perhaps ever before. My most recent Frankensystem made the arrows in a movie swish around the room, the cannons shake the floor. It enabled the baddies to sneak up behind us, while 5.1 albums on Blu-ray revealed instruments and backing vocals buried by the usual stereo mix, bringing to life the highest strings, the lowest bass notes, the most subtle percussion.

So although we have only two ears, we hear in surround sound. Almost every reproduction technology has been an attempt to make a recording more closely replicate the way we hear “live”. Dolby has specialised in improving sound quality since American engineer Ray Dolby hung up his shingle in England in the 1960s. The company came here in 2005 after buying Lake Technology, an Australian start-up developing, among other things, surround sound for headphones.

Tim Neal, Dolby Australia’s managing director, tells us the key to Atmos is that it is object-based rather than channel-based. “When an artist is mixing their content for a channel-based experience , they are already assuming the playback system. But that may not be the one their audience uses.” “We’re able to encode the audio in a way that describes the artist’s intent,” says Neal, “then, at the end of the chain, we render that intent in the most faithful way we can, given the playback system, even if it is simply over headphones.”

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