Mark Cerny talks Dolby Atmos support for PlayStation 5

eurogamer.net:

In the wake of our reporting on PlayStation 5's new Dolby Atmos support in last week's DF Direct Weekly, Sony's marketing team got in touch with a response from PS5 lead system architect, Mark Cerny, on how the new surround sound set-up actually works. In the Direct, we speculated that the PS5's existing, very impressive Tempest 3D audio data was most likely being recalculated and injected into the Dolby Atmos 'container'.

If you think about it, this is an innovative solution but it's also the only way that the PS5's existing library of titles can actually work with Atmos set-ups as until now, developers would not have mastered audio to support the 7.1.4 speaker system.

In his statement, Mark Cerny takes us through the entire audio pipeline in PlayStation 5 and how support has been extended to accommodate the extra speakers that an Atmos set-up supplies. The nature of Sony's solution means that the Atmos support is entirely lag-free, in contrast to some issues we've had with Xbox and Windows PCs. Is this solution actually an Atmos mix though? It's 'as good as' from a mathematical perspective, but with full support now added, sound engineers can master their audio mixes on full Atmos-spec equipment, meaning there's scope for further improvement.

Here's the complete breakdown:

It's probably easiest to talk about Tempest-based 3D Audio and the Dolby device support in terms of Ambisonic audio, which is increasingly popular these days (note there are other strategies for 3D Audio, including ones that use discrete 3D audio objects, but situation is rather similar).

Ambisonic audio can be viewed as a pretty radical extension of stereo audio. With stereo audio, the game's audio engine (or the middleware being used) will add a