Take: A promising technology, convenient and cheap to use devices, spice it all up with clever marketing – and the recipe for success is ready. Pretty easy actually, isn’t it? And yet the history of consumer electronics alone is full of flops that cost millions, even billions of euros. How can that be? A little review on the occasion of a new surround sound technology.
Nils Wülker, sometimes taps his foot to the beat, sometimes he conducts a bit. He wrote the music that is playing, and above all he played the solos with trumpet and flugelhorn, accompanied by his band and the Munich Radio Orchestra. Wülker sits in a basement room with a wooden floor and soundproof walls. They are important for the sound, and that’s what it’s all about here in the MSM studio in Munich’s Maxvorstadt. Loudspeakers, large and small, are placed all around, even on the ceiling. Everything is dominated by a large mixer and computer monitors. It’s considered one of the best studios when it comes to a technology that’s been around in cinemas for some time, but is now supposed to make music productions sound better too: Dolby Atmos, too spatial audio called.
Wülker, a well-known German jazz musician, had his new record produced using the new technology. Now he acts as an ambassador for it. “One stands more in the sound”, he says enthusiastically, “closer to nature”. Nature, he doesn’t mean bird calls or the sound of the sea, but the spatial impression: “Like when I’m standing in the hall,” he says.
If you believe the Dolby people, the Atmos version developed for music playback has already established itself well. 60 of the 100 most streamed songs have already been produced using Atmos technology, as have nine of the ten songs nominated for the most recent Grammy. But is that a reason to buy? Do customers ask about it? Except for hi-fi enthusiasts, probably not. Because you can hear a difference if you switch from ordinary stereo to Atmos. But if you are not an expert, you will hardly sit up and say: That must be Atmos! The difference is by no means as big as the difference between mono and stereo, some experts even find some Atmos mixes worse than the stereo mix. And the difference can only be properly perceived with hearing equipment, at least from the good middle class. It must also have special electronics on board to process the format.
So could Dolby Atmos Music also disappear after a big hype? And what could be the reasons for this? After all, there are plenty of examples of technologies that have not caught on. While some, such as digital audio tape (DAT), were technically good, it took expensive equipment to exploit them. The music industry also objected, fearing that the quality of digital recording and playback would mean selling fewer sound carriers.
Without Steve Jobs, the music industry would probably not have recognized the potential of MP3
As you can see, that was before the triumph of MP3 – a digital format that drastically reduced the amount of data in pieces of music without incurring excessive losses. The music industry was initially powerless against this technology, which also coincided with the spread of reasonably fast Internet access. It took someone like Apple’s father Steve Jobs to spread the word that it would be better to sell songs for 99 cents instead of earning nothing at all if everyone was swapping MP3s over the internet. In the meantime, the business with digital music data for sale has almost disappeared again. The current thing is streaming, i.e. access, financed by advertising or by subscription, via the Internet to a huge database of pieces of music.
CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs were somewhere in between, and today they feel less important than the good old records. They keep their niche stable – for the fans of analogue technology, when music was not yet recorded as boring numerical values. The small, shiny digital discs definitely fulfill their purpose, the playback devices have become enormously cheap through mass production, and they can also be played on computers and game consoles. And unlike analog records, a small scratch doesn’t bother them. In the age of streaming, they have simply become obsolete for the majority.
It was quite predictable that hardly anyone would want to sit in front of the TV with 3D glasses
The case with 3D television is different. It was actually foreseeable that nothing would happen. It started with the chicken and egg problem: Why build devices when there’s no content? On the other hand, why produce content when there are no devices? At least the entertainment electronics industry believed so firmly in the triumph of three-dimensional viewing that they went all out and threw whole series of 3D devices onto the market. Unfavorable, however: Two technologies competed, the one with electronically controlled so-called shutter glasses and the one with polarization glasses, as they are also used in the cinema. Both technologies have their advantages and disadvantages, but they have all but disappeared outside of the cinema.
Crucial was the fairly predictable fact that people don’t want to sit in front of the TV with 3D glasses on. The possible profit was not particularly large either. What brings a little depth to an ultimately rather small rectangle. This cannot be compared to a cinema screen. In the cinema, too, 3D is mostly only used for large films full of effects – probably also because the technical production effort for a 3D film is considerably higher than for a normal film. In addition, too fast cuts are prohibited.
What does all this mean for new and upcoming technologies? Dolby Atmos Music speaks for failure: There is a competing format from Sony and Fraunhofer (360 Reality Audio) and it requires suitable playback devices. One can doubt whether Atmos speakers built into TVs or soundbars, which also project sounds onto the ceiling, really bring that much added value. On the plus side, Apple is heavily promoting it. With other streaming services, many pieces can also be called up in Atmos or the Sony format. Also good: You can also play the music on conventional, non-compatible stereo devices without any problems.
Historically, consumer electronics have always worked best when they were reasonably cheap, easy to use, and when they gave people something they wanted. All of this applies to normal television, but less so to TV with all-round sound and other bells and whistles. The best technology has not always prevailed, for example with video recorders. Better marketing, sometimes also the market power of a manufacturer or the wrong point in time play an important role. And one thing is also consistently evident: no technology is for eternity – even if it dominates the market at the time.