I DJ’d at Ministry of Sound in Dolby Atmos and made music go sideways

Inside London’s Ministry of Sound nightclub, behind an imposing wall of flashing lights and rubber-tipped knobs, I’m cueing up a song. Beside me are eight of Pioneer’s top-of-the-range CDJ-2000 digital turntables, which glow and pulse to a silent beat, while a grand DJM-900 mixer sits in between, its confusing array of faders, switches, and buttons eagerly awaiting to be fiddled with. To aspiring DJs—or even those that have already reached the heady heights of stardom—the DJ booth at Ministry is the ultimate reward, the place that makes all those hours spent cutting in vocals with a rickety crossfader worthwhile.

And so, with Flux Pavilion’s “I Can’t Stop” cued up on my left and the volume cautiously set just halfway up, I hit play, the bass reverberating through Ministry’s famously unrestrained bass bins. As the vocals begin to swirl around the room, and a synth line swoops in from the right, I look up, expecting to see a writhing mass of revellers and screaming fans.

Instead, there’s just an empty dance floor.

As much as I’d have liked to have fulfilled my teenage dream of playing a solid set to a packed-out nightclub, there’s another reason why I’ve secured a slot inside Ministry’s hallowed DJ booth. Instead of the usual 40 speakers spread across the edges of the dance floor, today there are over 60, filling the gaps in between them and across the ceiling. Ministry is the world’s first nightclub to be kitted out with Dolby Atmos, the multichannel audio format designed to surround cinema-going audiences with a wall of sound and effects that can fly in from any axis. Now, Dolby’s giving DJs the same flexibility with a new audio format, and a new desktop DJ app that hooks up to a standard Pioneer CDJ.

Dolby Atmos DJ is the brainchild of a group of DJs, musicians, and audio engineers that were once part of Dolby’s larger cinema team. After using Dolby’s extensive studio facilities and treated rooms in San Francisco to mix their own music, the group began showcasing its work to industry insiders. Word soon spread through the company. After some arm twisting, Dolby agreed to fund the project, freeing the group from its cinema commitments and placing ex-engineer turned content manager Gabriel Cory at the helm. Cory, who also freelances as an audio engineer and producer, is seemingly even more excited than I am to be behind the decks at Ministry, quickly taking the opportunity to crank up the extremely loud sound system.

“What we’ve done at Ministry is there are six [speaker] stacks, but what you might not see is that there are 16 speakers filling the wall in between,” explains Cory. “And basically, what you can do is mix you tracks so they hit all the speakers at once, or certain parts of the song hit everything like the bass and drums, and then you can move the stems [individual parts/instruments] you wanna take out of that and place them anywhere in the room. Things can around and above you and give you this totally immersive, interactive live show. The app itself has things built into it, but it’s connected into the industry standard CDJ line in HID [Hardware Interface Device] mode, so you could still have the app window closed and do the show.”

Sat above the decks and the mixer is a MacBook Pro running Dolby’s Atmos DJ software. The software is divided into three sections: the left shows a piece of music with all its individual stems, the right shows another piece of music and its stems, while the middle contains a box with small numbered circles that fly around it as the music plays. Each number corresponds to a stem, the colour indicates from which song (on the left or right) that stem is playing, and their position and size shows where within the room the audio should come from. It’s surprisingly easy to understand, yet extremely powerful. Each individual stem can be soloed, muted, have its volume adjusted, and of course be moved around the room on-the-fly simply by clicking on one of the moving circles and dragging it around.

What makes the Dolby Atmos solution unique, is that it doesn’t require a specific number of speakers to function. In a classic Dolby Digital 5.1 mix, sounds are assigned to a specific speaker, so if you wanted a sound to come from behind the listener on the right, you’d pan it to the rear right channel. With Atmos, sounds are “object based,” meaning that the sound is given a specific XYZ coordinate within a 3D space, and the system figures out which speaker array to pump it through, no matter how many (up to 64) or few (as low as two) there are. Even better, in a pan the sound moves through each individual speaker in the path, creating an extremely immersive experience.

What’s especially neat is that means tracks mixed specifically in Atmos—which come from the likes of producers and artists with access to individual stems like Yousef and Flux Pavilion—can contain automated 3D pans and movements made ahead of time, resulting in a twirling mix of colourful circles from within the Atmos DJ app.

Such powerful tools don’t come cheap. Aside from the cost of the additional speakers themselves, the system requires a Rendering and Mastering Unit (RMU) from Dolby in order to process the XYZ data and pump it out to the speakers. Typically used in film mastering studios, the RMU accepts up to 128 audio inputs and pumps them out over 64 outputs, using the physical measurements of the room—a requirement of the Atmos Music system—to figure out where to send sounds. Given that the RMU doesn’t actually have a list price and is only available through installers and trade dealers, I imagine that if you have to ask, you can’t afford one.

That’s me behind the decks.

Mark Walton

That’s me behind the decks. Mark Walton

Mark Walton

Mark Walton

Corey runs me though some of the neat things you can do with Atmos.

Mark Walton

Corey runs me though some of the neat things you can do with Atmos. Mark Walton

Mark Walton

Corey runs me though some of the neat things you can do with Atmos. Mark Walton

There’s much knob-twiddling to be done with Atmos.

Mark Walton

The Atmos software is easy to understand, but mixing 3D audio on-the-fly still requires a mouse.

Mark Walton

Corey admiring his handiwork.

Mark Walton

An empty club, but I finally played at Ministry!

Mark Walton

Before taking to the decks I stand in the middle of the weirdly empty dance floor, club lights in full swing, while Cory drops a Dolby Atmos teaser track. “Hello, boys and girls,” booms the deepest of voices, “My name is Atmos.” This is swiftly followed by a bongo-like beat that sweeps around the room, while birds and crickets chirp above. The bongos soon fade, and are replaced with a soft synth and a vocal line that seems to come at me from the back of the room, rising above my head, before gently settling at the front. Then, the beat drops. It’s extremely loud, but startlingly clear, a testament to the expert tuning that’s gone into creating the signature Ministry sound.

But the Atmos is even better. There’s a solid bed of sounds on which the bass and drums sit, but synths, vocals, and even some of the top end percussion like high-hats whiz around the room, rising and falling with the highs and lows of the music. It literally adds another dimension to the listening experience, and while I’ve no doubt several large bourbons and a room full of sweaty dancers would no doubt help make the whole thing feel a tad more authentic, I can’t help but be impressed. Even stereo tracks not specifically mixed for Atmos like Adele’s “Hello” benefit from the Atmos treatment, her voice creeping across from the back of the room towards the front, before coming to a crescendo across all the speakers at the chorus.

My attempts to mix in Atmos are far less accomplished than Cory’s (read: terrible), but I am able to push sounds around the room, and even solo a stem from another track and mix it in from the left to the right. Right now, that’s all handled by a mouse—hardly an elegant solution, particularly for musicians that crave the tactile feedback of buttons and knobs—but hardware solutions are apparently being developed. Even being able to directly map the touchpad of a Macbook to the X and Y axis of the space, similar to a Korg Kaoss Pad, would make a huge difference to the live experience. There’s also the small matter of software support. Right now, only Dolby’s own software supports the required file format, and for DJs that depend on the likes of Serato DJ or Ableton Live, that makes Atmos a non-starter.