Ever noticed how nobody releases music in mono anymore? Not indie artists, not major labels, not the guy making beats in his bedroom. Mono just… stopped. And the story of how that happened is stranger, slower, and messier than most people think. It’s also, I’d argue, the exact story playing out again right now with immersive audio. I run a Dolby Atmos studio, so yes, I have a horse in this race. Stay with me anyway.
Stereo is older than your grandparents’ record player
Here’s a date that surprises people: stereo was invented in 1931.
An EMI engineer named Alan Blumlein took his wife to the movies and got annoyed that an actor’s voice came out of one speaker on one side of the room no matter where the actor stood on screen. So he went and solved it. His notes on what he called “binaural sound” are dated September 25, 1931, and he filed the patent that December. It was granted in 1933 as UK patent 394,325, and it covered stereo records, stereo film, even the microphone technique that still carries his name. By December 1933 his team was cutting stereo test discs at EMI’s Hayes site. Over at Bell Labs, Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra had already made the earliest surviving stereo recording in March 1932.
So the technology existed, worked, and was patented… and then commercial music ignored it for a quarter century. The first mass-produced stereo disc didn’t appear until Audio Fidelity put one out in November 1957, with the first stereo LPs reaching regular record buyers in March 1958.
Twenty-seven years from invention to the record shop. Keep that number in mind next time someone tells you Atmos is taking too long.
Nobody knew where to put anything
And when stereo finally did arrive, here’s the part I love: there were no rules. None. Nobody had decided where instruments should go.
Listen to the Beatles’ first album if you want to hear this in the wild. Please Please Me was recorded in one famous day in February 1963 on a two-track machine, with the band’s instruments on one track and the vocals on the other. That split wasn’t an artistic choice. George Martin did it so he could balance vocals against the band when mixing down to mono, which was the version everyone cared about. When EMI needed a stereo version, the solution was blunt: instruments hard left, vocals hard right, a little reverb poured over the middle to glue it together. The documentation from the era is plain about the priorities – the mono mix got the attention, and the stereo mix was, quote, “comparatively rudimentary.”
The whole industry was improvising like that. In 1959 a bandleader named Enoch Light put out Persuasive Percussion on Command Records, an album built specifically so hi-fi owners could test their new stereo gear, with instruments placed hard left or hard right so you could hear the separation. A demo record, basically. It spent 13 weeks at number one on Billboard’s stereo chart and got credited with helping put the stereo disc on the map. People were buying records to hear panning. Imagine.
It gets better. For early Beatles singles that had no stereo version at all, Martin created “mock stereo” by shoving the low frequencies to one side and the highs to the other. Fake stereo, engineered from a mono master, because the sleeve needed to say stereo. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s exactly what automated stereo-to-Atmos upmixes are doing today. I wrote about why real stems beat an upmix in my stereo vs Atmos piece, but history already wrote the ending: the shortcuts aged badly, and the real mixes became the catalog.
The conventions we now treat as laws of nature – vocal in the center, bass in the center, drums spread realistically – got worked out later, mix by mix, by engineers feeling their way through a format nobody had rules for yet.
That’s where immersive audio is right now. There’s no rulebook for where a synth pad lives in a sphere. The engineers mixing in Atmos today are the ones writing the conventions the next generation will treat as obvious. I find that genuinely exciting, and I get why some people find it terrifying. Both reactions are correct.
The flip, when it came, came fast
Here’s the other number worth sitting with. As late as 1967, stereo was only 38.6% of US album sales. Mono was still winning, nine years after stereo hit shops. Then the major labels issued their last mono albums in 1968, and one year later Abbey Road came out in stereo only. The format that had been “winning” for thirty-seven years didn’t fade. It fell off a cliff.
Transitions look slow, right up until they’re finished.
Follow the money, because the labels are
In January 2024, Apple did something streaming platforms basically never do: they offered to pay up to 10% higher royalties if your track is available in Spatial Audio. Platforms fight to pay artists less, always, and here’s the biggest music retailer on earth paying a premium to fill its catalog with immersive audio mixes.
Labels noticed. The majors have been commissioning Atmos mixes of their back catalogs for a few years now. That’s not an experiment, that’s a land grab, and they’re doing it because they remember what catalog reissues were worth the last time the default format changed. Meanwhile playback is already everywhere: AirPods, soundbars, TVs, phones, and cars from Mercedes, Cadillac, Lucid, and Rivian all play Atmos out of the box. Apple has defaulted to Spatial Audio on Apple Music since 2021. If you streamed music on AirPods this week, you probably heard an Atmos mix without knowing it.
The audience already switched. They just didn’t announce it.
What immersive audio sounds like from the chair
I built my studio near Victoria, BC in 2021, the first fully-featured Atmos room on Vancouver Island. Since then I’ve mixed Marianas Trench’s Haven in Atmos, Elijah Woods’ EP look what i made, and a 90-minute feature film called Colorblind. The work mixed in this room has passed 448 million streams, verified by Muso.AI, so I’m not guessing from the sidelines.
And what converted me wasn’t a spec sheet. It was watching artists hear their own song in the room for the first time. There’s a moment, usually about eight bars in, where they stop talking. Every time. A background vocal they’d buried in the stereo mix suddenly has a place to live. The reverb tail isn’t fighting the guitars anymore because it’s behind you. Stereo asks every element in a song to share one narrow window. Atmos gives the song a room.
I won’t pretend every mix translates perfectly everywhere. Binaural rendering on headphones still involves compromise, and I check every mix against the headphone fold-down because that’s where most listeners are. It’s honest work with rough edges. So was stereo in 1963, when the band was on the left and the singer was on the right.
The part where I could be wrong
Maybe immersive audio’s timeline is slower than I think. Format transitions look inevitable in hindsight and foggy in the middle, and I’m aware I’m the guy at the barbecue telling you barbecues are the future.
But the downside math isn’t symmetrical. If you mix your record in Atmos and the transition stalls, you spent a bit more and you own a future-proof master. If you skip it and the transition lands, your catalog is the mono record in 1969. One of those outcomes is annoying. The other one is expensive forever. The cost question is real, and I answered it with actual numbers in what a Dolby Atmos mix costs, so I won’t rehash it here.
Where immersive audio goes from here
Blumlein to the record shop took 27 years. Record shop to mono’s funeral took ten. If Apple’s 2021 spatial push was our 1958, the clock’s been running for five years already, and the 38.6% lesson says the scoreboard will look like mono’s winning right up until the year it isn’t.
So here’s the question I’d sit with, whether you’re an artist, an engineer, or a label with a catalog: when the default flips, do you want to have been mixing while the rules were still being written… or paying rush rates to catch up after somebody else wrote them?
If you want to hear what immersive audio does to your own music in a room like this, get in touch. First listen is the whole argument.
Todd Hooge is the founder of Sonic Forest Studios and mixes in Dolby Atmos full-time. His immersive work has over 448 million verified streams.