With this in mind, what kind of audio experience do we get from other streaming services?
“Dolby Atmos is an incredible codec.
Netflix has some content, but you better be on an Ultra HD plan and hunt for it.
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Its also gadget dependent,” Samuel Cordery, collaboration technologies expert, told Lifewire via Twitter.
Letter Soup
TheNetflix Android updateadds “Extended HE-AAC with MPEG-D DRC (xHE-AAC).”
This will, says Netflix, be a “sonic delight to members who stream on these devices.”
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One notable part of this new codec is loudness management, which evens things out for easier listening.
The volume level of the explosions will then be closer to the dialog.
So, those kids watching movies on the morning metro commute are about to get even more annoying.
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It gets even more confusing.
You find it in cinemas and in home theater devices, but the home version is not the same.
Its stripped down, despite sharing the same name.
Thankfully, companies like Netflix and Apple are making things easier to understand.
2020 was a great year for video streaming, thanks to the stay-at-home pandemic.
But it is still pushing hard into mobile.
This new audio format is one mobile-focused move.
Another is the addition ofcheaper, mobile-only plans in Africa.
Meanwhile, Apple is all about mobile.
Spatial audio is one such trick, and one that will be hard for anyone else to follow.
Spatial audio doesnt improve the audio quality of movies and TV shows.
Imagine watching a movie on a TV.
Do the same thing with headphones, and the audio moveswiththe headphones.
But not with spatial audio.
This trickery extends to some pretty immersive surround-sound, too.
Plus, it already solved the problem of noisy background audio with its $250 noise-canceling AirPods Pro.
Either way, though, mobile streaming is getting pretty great.
