Two formats, and what each one needs

This is the format that ships to everyone, on every platform, including anyone listening through a share link without an account.

Binaural is not “stereo but wider”. It is a recording technique and mix that preserves the cues your ears use to locate a sound — the tiny timing and level differences between your two ears, and the way your own head shadows sound coming from one side. Played back on headphones, that information reconstructs, and the railway announcement is genuinely above and behind you rather than somewhere inside your skull.

Any headphones. No setup, no compatible hardware, no setting to find.

Scenery serves Dolby Atmos as an E-AC-3 stream with Joint Object Coding, which is the format Dolby Atmos is distributed in. On iOS and Android, that stream is handed to the operating system, which decodes it and renders it to whatever you are actually listening on.

Dolby Atmos requires a Premium or Max plan. The free plan does not include any Atmos time — not a reduced amount, none. This is the one place we would rather be blunt than clever: if you sign up free to try Atmos, you will not get Atmos.

Dolby, Dolby Atmos, and the double-D symbol are registered trademarks of Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation.

Worth stating plainly, because a lot of audio marketing is vague here on purpose.

Scenery does not inspect your device. We do not probe your headphones, query your speakers, or test your browser's codec support. There is no “optimising for your setup” step, because there is no such step.

What happens is simpler. If you are entitled to Atmos and the recording has an Atmos mix, we send you the Atmos stream. Your operating system or browser decodes it. If that decode fails for any reason, Scenery switches to the binaural mix and keeps playing, and tells you it has done so.

That means the honest answer to “will I hear Atmos?” is: you will be sent Atmos, and your device decides. On iOS and Android that path is well-trodden. In a browser it depends on the browser, and we have not tested them all, so we are not going to name one.

This is the group most under-served by ambient audio, and it is a group we actually thought about.

Almost everything in this category is mixed for headphones and nothing else. A multi-speaker owner puts on an ambient track and gets a stereo image collapsed into the front two channels — the room stays silent, which is the opposite of the point.

Scenery's Atmos mixes are delivered to your system as an Atmos stream and rendered by it. The recordings were made in real places with real boundaries — a station concourse, a coastline with the sea on one side and a grove behind — which is material that a room-scale system has something to do with.

We describe this as delivery, not as driving your speakers. Your receiver, sound bar or TV does the rendering, and it will do it according to your own room configuration.