Sony is developing a 360-degree immersive audio format to change how we enjoy music

Sony is working on a new audio format designed to replicate the live concert experience — and it promises to be a game-changer for music lovers.

It’s being billed as the “future of music”. Sony is working on a new audio format designed to make you feel like you’re at a live concert.

It’s calling it 360 Reality Audio and uses object-based spatial audio technology to fire different parts of the song at the listener from different angles. For example, the vocals will hit you from the front, the drums from the side and the backup vocals from behind.

It’s not just left ear or right ear but it feels very much like you’re immersed in sound from all directions. When listening with headphones, it moves the music outside your head.

Sony demonstrated the 360 Reality Audio at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last week. To illustrate the concept, listeners sat in the middle of a small room inside a sphere of speakers that emphasised different instruments and sounds when a song was played.

Following that a small and delicate microphone was placed in the listener’s ear to measure their eardrum and calibrate a pair of headphones accordingly. The same song was then played through the headphones, allowing the listener to have the exact same immersive sound experience.

It genuinely felt like the music was coming from specific parts of the room rather than simply being fed into your ears like a regular stereo track.

Sony is looking to bring 360 Reality Audio to devices in late 2019.

It’s certainly not the first kind of object-based surround sound audio technology. Audio engineering giant Dolby Laboratories has its own audio format that allows you to hear sound in a 360-degree bubble when pumped out with an array of speakers, which it licenses to consumer electronics manufacturers.

But the Sony innovation — which is still in development — is probably the best immersive sound I’ve heard and has real potential to eventually change how consumers enjoy music.

According to Sony, the company intends to release a new format based on the common MPEG-H 3D Audio standard that will allow artists to create an immersive experience for fans by “mapping sound sources such as vocals, chorus and instruments with positional information of distance and angle to suit their creative and artistic purpose”.

Existing songs can also be remastered in Sony’s new immersive format.

The audio format moves the music from two locations of a standard stereo connection to a more genuine surround sound experience.

Like the CES demonstration mentioned above, in order to get the best experience the inside of the user’s ears need to be measured. To that end, Sony is developing an app to enable users to take photos of their ears with their smartphone to measure the “hearing characteristics ... and apply signal processing accordingly”.

The company says it is looking into the potential for a variety of audio devices to support this type of content but will initially focus on the technological development of its headphones and wireless speakers to produce the 360-degree sound.

But it’s likely they won’t be available until late 2019 at the earliest.

Sony says that other manufacturers’ audio products that support the distribution format will also be able to play back 360 Reality Audio content.

As part of the rollout of the new audio technology, the company plans to distribute 360-degree content on premium plans offered by music streaming services.

Ole Obermann, chief digital officer of record label conglomerate Warner Music Group, said:

“Sony’s immersive audio tier will add a new dimension to streaming services and offers music lovers a high quality experience they won’t get elsewhere.

“We are impressed with what we have heard so far, and happy to support the launch of this new technology.”