Making spatial sound more intimate

LONDON — Immersive, all-encompassing sound is closely tied to the cinema. But some of the early developments in this technology — including quadraphonics and Ambisonics — were intended for music recording. 

Today’s dominant immersive audio format, Dolby Atmos, which was initially designed for film production, is now used not only for music on Amazon, Apple and Tidal platforms but also forms the basis of an increasing number of audiobooks and sound dramas.

Writer-director Dirk Maggs was an early pioneer, producing episodic dramas in Dolby Surround for BBC Radio in the early to mid-1990s featuring Superman, Batman and Spider-Man. His work was in a multichannel sound format based on a matrixing technique to produce left, center, right front channels and a mono rear channel. After leaving the BBC in 1995, Maggs continued to work in surround sound, moving on to Dolby Digital 5.1 and, more recently, Dolby Atmos.

The initial and substantial challenge Maggs needed to overcome was compatibility with stereo and mono. “When I did “Superman: Doomsday and Beyond” in 1993 as my first Dolby Surround production, the BBC engineers were very concerned about broadcasting it, even though it was encoded to a stereo signal,” Maggs says. “In mono, the back channels would become invisible, which was how Dolby Surround/stereo worked at the time. I did it anyway because I knew I wouldn’t send anything critical storywise to the back channel. It worked very well, and we ended up doing all our BBC stuff in the format.”

Binaural and costs

Another surround technique that the BBC has employed over the years for both radio and TV is binaural. This reproduces the spatial nature of human hearing by recording through a dummy head fitted with a microphone in each “ear.” The drawback is that the full effect, which is impressive, can only be fully appreciated on headphones.

When audiobook publisher Audible approached Maggs to produce a sound adaptation of the “Alien” franchise, they discussed whether to record it in Dolby Atmos, which provides the sensation of height as well as width and depth, or in binaural. In the end, the series, which began in 2016, was recorded in stereo.

A later project for Maggs was adapting “The Sandman” comic books, with Audible in 2021, agreeing to record and mix the second series in Atmos. Maggs says this allowed him to move sounds around in a much more three-dimensional spatial arena. “The clients don’t always understand the benefits of something like Atmos because, if it’s streamed as a binaural signal, it is best enjoyed through headphones by people on their own,” he comments. “Now they understand that most of the audience listen on earpods, so it becomes easier to say that it will sound better. The real problem is talking about extra costs in post production.”

Need to be ambitious

Another regular supplier to Audible is creative agency Granny Eats Wolf, with credits including “The Woman in Black,” “1984” and, most recently, “Harry Potter.” Like Maggs, GEW Founder and Chief Executive Nathan Freeman has a BBC background, except he also worked in commercial radio. “When I left the BBC in 2022 and started GEW, our mission was to bring together different parts of the entertainment industry and see what we could do with audio,” he says. “Early on, we found a partner in Audible, which is when we started doing immersive audiobooks in Dolby Atmos.”

From there, he continues, the company has worked to understand the technology’s capabilities. “We wanted to use Dolby Atmos as quickly as possible, and find people who could be ambitious,” Freeman comments. 

“Audible has opened the door for companies to play with this technology and heighten the immersion of storytelling. They considered a horror, and we wanted to do it in Atmos. They chose ‘The Woman in Black.’ We experimented as much as we could on the project, and it really opened our eyes to the system’s capability and how good it sounded.”

Not genre-exclusive

While immersive audio productions often fall into the horror, science fiction, fantasy or action genres, Freeman and Maggs stress that the technology is not genre-exclusive. “It suits anything where you want to be immersive in storytelling,” Freeman says. “We make most of our productions in Dolby Atmos, and the render we give at delivery depends on where it’s going. We believe in the quality and immersiveness. Even when you fold it down to a lower resolution, the algorithms and binauralness ensure that it still sounds great.”

Freeman adds that using Dolby Atmos also influences creative decision-making — evident in GEW’s production of Charles Dickens’ ghost story, “The Signalman.” “You put the story first and then think about where the listener is in it,” he explains. “When we did ‘The Signalman,’ we were telling the story as a listener on the train tracks with the action taking place around them. You’re experiencing the story, not just being told it.”

GEW collaborates with external studios for the final mix. “We’re a remote-first creative studio. While we create the content, we work with other suppliers and producers with their own studios,” Freeman explains. “We collaborate with anyone, anywhere in the world, which does throw up some challenges, but it gives us flexibility. With Dolby Atmos, 90% of the work can be done using headphones, but we do need to use proper studios to do the finishing touches.”

The space within

Most audio post production companies in the United Kingdom today have at least one Dolby Atmos-equipped mixing suite. Among these is Brighton-based Brown Bear Audio, which works on a variety of audio projects, including broadcast TV, film, radio and animation. 

Last year, it opened a studios division aimed at the burgeoning podcast market. Founder and Managing Director Thomas Dalton says these are still relatively early days for the studio, which aims to attract narrative-driven podcasts that could involve immersive audio, as well as the standard “talking-heads” variety.

“With something like that, you’re creating the whole world through sound,” Dalton comments. “You’ve got the narration but also the entire space within. There is a barrier to entry due to the additional cost of Dolby Atmos and the time it takes, which is a shame. The technical beauty of it is that it’s very easy to work with. You can mix in Atmos and it folds down to different formats, including 7.1, 5.1 and stereo. We are talking to a specialist in children’s audiobooks, which can lend themselves to a Dolby Atmos or immersive mix more so than long-form fiction.”

Encouraging people to invest more in technology, even to enhance production, is a challenge that producers and facilities will always face. But they are overcoming the technical barriers to immersive sound for audio-only programming, which is finding an enthusiastic new audience in today’s streaming and headphone-oriented world.

The author trained as a radio journalist and worked for British Forces Broadcasting Service Radio as a technical operator, producer and presenter before moving into magazine writing during the late 1980s. He is now involved with an online station based on the south coast of England, where he lives.

This originally appeared in the special edition, The Innovators 2026. You can view or download this publication for free here.

You can read or download all RedTech publications for free here.

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