“Oh, great, another format war! That’s just what we want!” said no AV fan ever.
Yet, on the surface at least, that’s precisely what it looks like we might be about to get following the unveiling at the recent CES in Las Vegas of Eclipsa Audio: a new surround sound format that is apparently designed to take on the audio dominance of Dolby and DTS.
What is Eclipsa Audio?
Eclipsa Audio is a new ‘3D audio technology’ capable of delivering up to 28 individual input channels in a single bit-stream. Each of these channels can be rendered out to speakers or headphones and can be set to either be fixed in nature, like a mic in a recording studio, or dynamic, to track moving objects such as a speeding vehicle in a movie car chase.
Creators can adjust the locations and intensity of sounds within the audio space Eclipsa Audio can create, as happens with Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, and there’s also support for the binaural rendering mobile applications need to deliver more immersive sound experiences to headphones.
Eclipsa Audio also allows listeners to adjust aspects of its sound for a more personal, customised experience.
Who is behind Eclipsa Audio?
Eclipsa Audio is the end result of two years of collaboration between Samsung and Google.
The two brands announced back in 2023 that they’d started working together on a new 3D audio platform under the working title of Immersive Audio Model and Formats (IAMF), and Eclipsa Audio is the final name given to the results of these combined efforts.
How is Eclipsa Audio different to other 3D sound formats?
The main difference between Eclipsa Audio – and, indeed, the main reason Samsung and Google decided to pursue its creation – is that it’s open source. In other words, while any soundtrack creator or playback device manufacturer who wants to use Dolby Atmos or DTS:X has to pay a licence fee for the privilege, Eclipsa Audio is free for anyone to use.
It’s easy to understand, then, why Samsung and Google would have been keen on coming up with an open-source 3D sound format.
For Samsung, it gives them a 3D sound system for their TVs, projectors, soundbars and so on that they don’t have to pay a third party to use. For Google, it allows amateur content creators to elevate their productions on sites such as Google’s YouTube with 3D audio without needing to go down the costly Dolby or DTS routes.
In fact, in theory at least, Eclipsa Audio could enable these content creators to deliver the sort of immersive sound experiences currently only associated with expensive Hollywood movies.
How do you get Eclipsa Audio?
Eclipsa Audio is an end-to-end audio system. So you need to have the right software to create Eclipsa Audio soundtracks and the right playback hardware able to decode Eclipsa Audio soundtrack files.
Samsung is the only brand so far to announce that it is building Eclipsa Audio support into its 2025 products. In fact, it will appear in pretty much all of Samsung’s new TVs, all the way from its affordable Crystal UHD models up to its premium 4K Quantum Dot OLED and Neo QLED 8K LCD models (such as the QN990F, pictured above). The brand has also announced that it will be including Eclipsa Audio in its soundbar range. It hasn’t confirmed exactly which soundbar models this will apply to, but it seems likely that the flagship HW-Q990F will be one of them.
The requirements for creating Eclipsa Audio mixes are a bit less clear at this stage, despite the system potentially living or dying on how straightforward it is to use. Google has stressed, though, that content creation will be possible across true consumer devices, while its open-source nature means that Eclipsa Audio supports several popular existing codecs, including LPCM, AAC, FLAC and Opus.
In fact, there are already multiple workflows available for creating the IAMF Eclipsa files. For instance, two different encoders are available that can encode WAV files to Eclipsa Audio, and it’s also possible already to merge IAMF files and video into an MP4 file. Technical details on what can be done can be found in a recent blog in the opensource section of googleblog, and there’s a link from that to a set of IAMF-related tools on github.
Google has also stated, finally, that it expects to be able to support Eclipsa Audio uploads and playback on YouTube at some point this year.
How good will Eclipsa Audio sound?
In principle, there’s no obvious technical reason why Eclipsa Audio tracks couldn’t sound fairly similar to Dolby Atmos and DTS:X mixes. Certainly, Samsung and Google talk enthusiastically about Eclipsa allowing anyone to give their creations a Hollywood feel.
That said, issues such as the likely relative lack of professional support compared with the Dolby and DTS licensed sound systems, the relative inexperience of the sort of creators Eclipsa Audio is initially aiming at, and the relatively ‘first draft’ state of the Eclipsa Audio toolset versus well established Dolby and DTS systems will all likely have a part to play in these early Eclipsa days.
Samsung and Google have revealed, however, that they are already working with the Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA) on developing a certification program for Eclipsa Audio devices, in a bid to achieve some level of performance consistency/quality control right from the get-go.
So is it game over for Dolby and DTS?
It’s not impossible that the arrival of Eclipsa Audio marks the beginning of yet another of the dreaded format wars that litter the history of home entertainment technology.
You could certainly question, in particular, Samsung’s motives for putting so much effort into developing Eclipsa Audio given that it famously chooses not to support Dolby Vision HDR on its TVs because it doesn’t want (or, as the brand prefers to claim, doesn’t feel the technical need) to pay the licence fee.
So maybe Samsung’s long-term hope really might be that Eclipsa Audio will ultimately conquer all and become the de facto sound format across Hollywood and beyond, consigning cash-hungry Dolby and DTS to the history books.
It’s hard, though, to believe that Samsung really thinks this could happen. Dolby Atmos and DTS:X are so hugely entrenched in the film and TV worlds now, and pretty much ubiquitous across home entertainment and commercial cinema hardware, that it’s tough to imagine them being jettisoned for a completely new audio ‘upstart’.
Also, the Samsung Dolby Vision situation we mentioned a moment ago is actually quite different to the Eclipsa Audio situation. While Samsung can argue (legitimately or otherwise) that what its TVs can do with the basic HDR10 format renders Dolby Vision unnecessary, if it ends up only supporting Eclipsa Audio on its TVs and soundbars then the Dolby and DTS soundtracks used on just about every film and TV show for years now simply won’t work. Or else they’ll default down to a much more basic mix that no amount of 3D spatial audio ‘virtualisation’ will be able to satisfactorily fix.
It’s no surprise, in fact, that Eclipsa’s main focus at this point is on an area where Dolby Atmos and DTS will likely never become a mainstream option: amateur content creation. There’s no indication yet that Eclipsa is being pushed at the big movie and TV studios.
This doesn’t mean Eclipsa Audio might not become an important player in the audio space. If it really can democratise the 3D audio creative process to a level where almost anyone can potentially create ‘Hollywood standard’ sound mixes, it has every chance of finding its way onto any number of YouTube videos.
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