Dolby Atmos entered India in 2012 with the launch of the first Atmos-enabled screen at the Sathyam Cinemas in Chennai. The same year, Rajinikanth’s Sivaji 3D was released with Dolby’s object-based audio technology and premiered at Sathyam. Since then, Dolby Atmos has become a household name, associated with earphones, headphones, home theatres, smart TVs, smartphones, and any other device with a speaker. And that is how most of us understand the technology – a 3D sound stage that creates a surround-sound effect while watching movies or listening to music using Atmos-enabled devices.
But that is just one half of what Dolby Laboratories does. The other half of the Atmos implementation occurs well before the end user hears the experience. This is the post-production stage of a song or movie, where Atmos-enabled software is used to upmix the music or remaster the movie audio, creating a 3D sound stage effect.
Then, when a song mixed using Atmos is played through an Atmos-enabled device, users get to hear music which was best described by The Weeknd as an experience that takes “music to a new place by creating an immersive world where you can feel every detail. It’s surreal.”
To experience this and learn more about how technology shapes the music creation process, I recently travelled to Fresh Lime Studios in Saket, New Delhi’s sole Dolby Atmos–certified studio.
Music Creation Inside a Dolby Atmos Studio
Fresh Lime Studios, founded by Berklee College of Music alumnus Tanishq Seth, features a Dolby Atmos-certified recording room, where he and his team assist musicians in creating and upmixing their songs in the 3D soundstage format.
The room is built around a 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos configuration. It features three tracking rooms, including an ISO booth, a live room, and a vocal booth, and comes with a full suite of gear from Neumann and Sennheiser. Notably, a 7.1.4 speaker setup refers to seven surround speakers placed around the listener at ear level, one subwoofer for low-frequency effects, and four overhead or height speakers used to deliver 3D spatial audio.
Dolby Atmos setup
Photo Credit: Dolby
At the heart of the music creation process is a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), a software (typically Avid Pro Tools or Steinberg Nuendo) that acts as the central hub to record, edit, mix, and produce audio (think of it as the Photoshop of sound). The DAW runs the Dolby Atmos Production Suite, a software toolkit developed by Dolby that allows sound engineers and music producers to create, mix, and monitor Dolby Atmos content within the DAW.
Within this toolset, music producers gain access to Atmos Renderer, which enables the placement of individual instruments, vocals, or effects as separate “audio objects” in a virtual 3D space. Unlike traditional stereo, where elements are fixed to the left or right channel, Atmos enables full freedom of movement by placing a vocal directly in front of the listener, panning guitar riffs behind, or letting ambient effects swirl above.
Notably, a typical setup supports up to 128 audio tracks, which can include up to 118 audio objects and 10 channel beds. The audio objects allow individual elements, such as a vocal line or snare hit, to move independently in 3D space, according to the producer or artist’s preference.
Seth told Gadgets 360 that every producer can have a different vision for a song, and they can upmix or produce the record differently, making the soundscape feel completely unique. Of course, there are some fundamentals to be adhered to, but everything else is a creative process.
As mentioned above, a track can either be created natively in Atmos or it can be upmixed (if the stereo version of the track already exists). For the former, the artist and the mixing engineer take spatial decisions from the ground up, and these can be more experimental in nature. When upmixing, the engineer recreates the intent of the stereo mix while enhancing it with more depth and dimensionality.
Once the Atmos mix is created, it is exported as an Audio Definition Model in Broadcast Wave Format (ADM BWF) file to retain all the positional and timing data. This master file is what platforms like Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal use to deliver spatial audio to listeners.
Singer Sanjeeta Bhattacharya, who showcased a song upmixed using Atmos, explained that this 3D sound stage also gives artists a lot of freedom in creating a unique audio experience. She highlighted that, unlike stereo, where audio arrives in a linear plane and can often feel flat, Dolby Atmos makes the listener feel like they’re in the same room as the artist and the band.
“With Dolby Atmos, we calibrate the environment to reflect how the content was mixed, not just for preference, but for spatial accuracy and emotional depth. This approach allows sound to move organically through any space, connecting with listeners in a way that feels both authentic and deeply engaging, thereby ensuring a consistent premium and immersive experience, no matter the device or setting,” said Sameer Seth, Director, Marketing-India, Dolby.
While most people know Dolby Atmos as a playback feature in headphones or TVs, its real impact may lie earlier in the studio, where it is quietly transforming how music is crafted, layered, and spatially designed.
