So, I listened to this soundtrack via YouTube: (58) OATS STUDIOS PRESENTS – MIGRANTS – a Short Film by Paul Chadeisson - YouTube
Pretty impressive stuff. So here is the deal. YouTube provides Dolby Atmos on mobile devices., not PCs and Laptops. So I was listening to this stuff on my studio PC, and I was thinking, damn, this sounds wide…I then exported the audio, out of sheer morbid curiosity, opened it in Cubase, and the stereo image was nowhere near as wide as the YouTube playback.
Can anyone shed some light as to what is going on here? I cannot understand how this can be.
Oh well, this will go down to the ether of mysteries, a well hidden secret weapon of the elite sound engineers, stored like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Indiana Jones & The Raiders of the Lost Ark…“So be it…Jedi”…
Interesting. I am not an expert for any of this.
I can hear a clear difference between listening to the video on my headphones and inserting Cubase in between.
I set up binaural monitoring in Cubase which gave more width again but some of the lower frequencies are lowered.
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You see what I mean?? There has to be a mixing process that allows this extra space. On YT, it sounds so wide. The dialogue is sharp and has a ton of space around it. When played back is just so narrow. I would love to know the ins and outs behind this…
Actually, I forgot to adjust the levels. After having done so I can’t hear a difference anymore.
Good news: I recorded the audio of the video in Audacity and in Cubase. Made a null test afterwards and they really null each other. So there is nothing wrong in Cubase.
Can you check that the playback levels are the same for the YT video and the Cubase recording? I checked on the display of my interface.
Hey, thanks so much for this test!
I didn’t think there was anything wrong with Cubase. My lack of understanding is within the decoding that YouTube is working with. I am pretty sure the short has been mixed in Atmos, but laptops and PCs aren’t supposed to support Dolby Atmos playback.
Even so, when I play the short on YT on a PC (tower) or a laptop, the sound is very wide and clear. When I export the audio and open it on my computer (any player, including Cubase; sorry , I should have mentioned that), the mix sounds completely different- very narrow and nowhere near as clear as what comes out from the YT playback…
This means that YouTube is reproducing the soundtrack of the video in a different format when played on these devices; it can’t be just normal stereo.