New Xbox One Update Coming Soon Focuses On Dolby Atmos Sound Upgrades

The team over at Xbox box are preparing to roll out a new firmware update for Microsoft's gaming [...]

By Liana 'LiLi' Ruppert

The team over at Xbox box are preparing to roll out a new firmware update for Microsoft's gaming console that will focus on bringing the Dolby Atmos sound quality using 3-D spatial audio technology to the Xbox One.

Though the system wasn't built to support this technology, the new upmixing software from Dolby will help make this inclusion seamless. Will it be a perfect replica of pure Atmos sound? No, but it will be very close not unlike how 4K relates to visual appeal.

It looks like while the team is focusing on honing this technology in for the Xbox One, a potential Windows 10 port is being considered as well -- though it won't be immediate and it doesn't sound like it's happening any time soon.

"Currently, we will not be doing the same for PC," said Steven Wilssens, Principle Program Manager Lead at Microsoft Audio to Wcctech. "The Windows 10 PC implementation only sends Dolby Atmos MAT encoded streams to the receiver when there is Spatial Sound to be rendered. That would be when someone is watching a Dolby Atmos movie, playing a spatial sound enabled game, or an app using the spatial sound APIs directly. When we are not sending Dolby MAT, your receiver will upmixing the audio to height channels with its own algorithm. The downside is that the behavior is not consistent between Xbox One and PC, the upside is/was that both devices had behavior that is optimized for the different devices and their usage. However, we might add a switch on PC that allows for the same behavior with PC as on Xbox in a future Windows 10 and/or Dolby Access update."

We don't have a date as for when the update will go live, though we know it's planned for sometime "soon." Still, this ups the entertainment factor of the console exponentially and bodes well for what the next generation will bring.

Thoughts on the audio focus of the next update? Sound off in the comment section below, or hit me up over on Twitter @DirtyEffinHippy!

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