Mike Mettler

"To be played at maximum volume." So went the listening instructions appearing in all caps near the bottom left of the back cover of David Bowie's June 1972 career-defining dystopian space-glam saga, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars.

As August comes to a close, it’s time for the first monthly installment of our ongoing Spatial Audio File column. As always, I’ve thoroughly spec’ed and checked all five tracks I’ve selected here by way of my personal deep-dive listening sessions on both my home system and headphones alike. You’ll find each and every one of them amidst the cavalcade of Made for Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos tracks within the ever-expanding Apple Music library.

With the fall season seemingly right around the corner, let’s take one more summer spin together and check out this month’s fine quartet of truly immersive tracks, which are. . .

I don’t know about you, but I love hearing what I call “the humanity of performance” while listening to music. What I mean by that is, whenever I hear singers take breaths before or after they sing their lines (or even when they do it in the middle of them!), and/or I discern things like chairs scraping across floors or fingers moving across fretboards, I’m totally cool with it.

These recording elements all give me a sense of space (i.e., where the recording took place and the proximity of those involved) and even the character of the performers, to some degree. Certain producers like their recordings to be more insular than that, which is certainly fine in isolated cases—but the more “real” a recording is the better, imo.

The reason I bring this up is there are plenty of human elements involved in the five tracks I’ve selected for this week’s Spatial Audio File. As always, I’ve thoroughly spec’ed and checked each track by way of my personal deep-dive listening sessions on both my home system and headphones alike. You’ll find each and every one of them amidst the scores of stellar Made for Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos tracks within the ever-growing Apple Music library. >p> Let’s all now plug directly into the inherent sonic sea of humanity at hand as we collectively check out this week’s five-spot of truly immersive tracks, which are. . .