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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- 360 Reality Audio was first introduced at CES 2019, with Sony aiming to bring it to streaming platforms.
- Apple and Dolby’s collaboration brought spatial audio into the mainstream.
- Lacking a streaming service or a strong foothold in hardware, Sony’s format struggled to gain traction.
Each year at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), technology companies from across the globe—ranging from well-known corporations to fledgling startups—converge in Las Vegas to present their latest innovations. At the 2019 event, Japanese electronics leader Sony unveiled its 360 Reality Audio spatial audio format.
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The initiative had heavyweight supporters—music icons like Pharrell Williams and Mark Ronson, major record labels such as Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, and rising music streaming platforms including Tidal and Amazon Music.
What Sony got right and what it missed
Sony had a solid strategy for shaking up the market: tap into its personal audio division to build the technology into its headphones, earbuds, and speakers; persuade music streaming services to embrace the format; use its music recording division to encourage artists to produce albums in the format; and license the technology to other audio manufacturers for a fee.
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At the time, Sony called its 360 Reality Audio the “future of music.” The company was absolutely right that immersive audio would become central to how people stream digital music as the decade turned; just seven years on, listeners expect immersive audio across nearly all the digital media they engage with.
What Sony didn’t anticipate was that it wouldn’t be a major force in shaping that future. The company’s mistake wasn’t flawed technology or poor market predictions—it simply wasn’t Apple.
How spatial audio shaped media in the 2020s
Immersive audio describes the sensation of being enveloped by sound coming from every direction. Spatial audio refers to the underlying technologies that produce these effects, though the two terms are frequently used interchangeably. Throughout the 2010s, spatial audio technologies were steadily gaining ground in the gaming and film industries.
In 2012, Dolby Laboratories launched its revolutionary Dolby Atmos spatial audio technology at the premiere of Pixar’s “Brave.” Three years later, DTS, Inc. introduced its own spatial audio format, DTS:X, at CES 2015.
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By 2019, both Sony’s 360 Reality Audio and Dolby’s Atmos were making their way onto music streaming platforms, with Tidal and Amazon Music among the first to adopt them. At that stage, Atmos was only accessible to Tidal subscribers with compatible home theater setups and to Amazon Music subscribers using an Echo Studio speaker.
Although Sony and Dolby were vying for a rapidly evolving emerging market, Sony’s spatial audio business model still had potential. Personalized spatial audio wasn’t yet a standard feature in consumer headphones, and manufacturers hadn’t yet committed to the necessary hardware or digital signal processing. Sony was also focused on fine-tuning its headphones for spatial personalization before opening the door for third-party manufacturers to participate.
To experience a personalized version of 360 Reality Audio, users had to go through an ear-mapping process in the Sony Headphones Connect (now Sound Connect) app. This personalization feature was exclusive to Sony headphones, and the technology analyzed the user’s ear shape to deliver the most immersive audio experience possible.
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Since Sony’s WH-1000XM3 over-ear headphones and WF-1000XM3 earbuds lacked built-in spatial-awareness hardware, users had to upload clear photos of their ears to the app so Sony could generate a personalized spatial audio sound field.
In time, Sony’s 360 Reality Audio was integrated into a number of home theater products from Denon, KEF, McIntosh, and Sennheiser, as well as Sony’s own home theater speakers and AVRs, in addition to support on Tidal, Deezer, and Amazon Music. The format was steadily gaining influence.
Owning an ecosystem means owning your future
In the summer of 2021, Apple announced that Apple Music and multiple generations of its AirPods, iPhones, Macs, iPads, and Beats headphones would support Dolby Atmos streaming and spatial audio with head-tracking. Overnight, millions of spatial audio-capable devices landed in consumers’ hands—a brand-new music experience delivered through a simple five-minute software update. The broad term “spatial audio” quickly became synonymous with Apple.
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Apple didn’t ask users to go through a complicated process of mapping their individual ear anatomy for a personalized experience. Apple extended its head-tracking capabilities to a wide range of existing Apple devices—a significant advantage over Sony, which never managed to capture a meaningful portion of the U.S. smartphone, tablet, or laptop market.
Additionally, Apple’s first-generation AirPods Pro and second-generation AirPods were already nearly two years old at that point, and both already contained the hardware needed for spatial awareness. While Apple had its own spatial audio technology, partnering with Dolby Atmos allowed the company to tap into an established, proven spatial audio format to draw more users to its music streaming service.
With Apple’s approach, artists could produce music in Dolby’s reliable, well-established Atmos spatial audio format and upload it directly to Apple Music, without Apple needing to develop a spatial audio format from the ground up. Apple’s Spatial Audio technology in its hardware only needed to manage head tracking for a personalized experience. Sony, by contrast, tried to handle everything on its own.
Beyond Sony’s cumbersome personalization process, it also lacked Apple’s unified streaming audience. In the second quarter of 2021, Apple Music alone had nearly as many subscribers as Amazon Music, Deezer, and Tidal combined.
What’s more, songs on Apple Music encoded in Dolby Atmos can technically be played on any headphones. As long as your smartphone and streaming platform support Atmos, you can enjoy it. Apple’s proprietary spatial audio technology is what powers the head-tracking magic.
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Apple won the way it always does: by controlling its own destiny. From the iPhone in your pocket to the platform you use to stream
When it comes to music, Apple sets the stage. Thanks to its tightly integrated hardware and software ecosystem and its expanding music streaming platform, Apple had the advantage of promoting spatial audio as a natural extension of its own ecosystem. Sony, on the other hand, presented its spatial audio format as a premium listening experience that users had to actively seek out.
Although Sony’s 360 Reality Audio and Dolby’s Atmos both debuted on select music streaming services simultaneously in 2019, the market simply wasn’t prepared. At that time, spatial audio music libraries were extremely limited, and consumer audio hardware hadn’t yet caught up with the trend.
Sony was upfront about what its format could do, clearly stating that “speaker systems capable of projecting sound in all directions will be able to reproduce a 360 Reality Audio experience.” Apple, by contrast, glossed over the significant gap between listening to Atmos through a phone’s small speakers versus a full multi-speaker arrangement. Apple never really explained how spatial audio with Dolby Atmos actually worked — only that it functioned seamlessly, requiring minimal effort from the user.
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Apple entered the market at precisely the right moment, launching its spatial audio in 2021. By then, AirPods were everywhere, and Dolby had already woven Atmos into numerous home theater systems, blockbuster movies, and video games, cementing its technology as a widely recognized name.
360 Reality Audio today
Sony’s 360 Reality Audio is still alive in 2026, available in Sony’s soundbars, premium receivers, and other products. Yet Atmos’s dominance is hard to ignore. Tidal, an early supporter of 360 Reality Audio, eventually dropped Sony’s spatial audio format to focus its resources on encoding more of its catalog in Dolby Atmos.
Moreover, Sony appears more focused on refining its headphones’ digital signal processing to virtually upmix stereo tracks than actively promoting the 360 Reality Audio format to consumers. Sony still lists its audio format on its consumer headphones’ product pages, but its virtual upmixing technologies take center stage.
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The Sony WH-1000XM6 headphones were the company’s first headphones to include Sony 360 Spatial Sound, the upmixing technology that isn’t locked behind a streaming service. 360 Spatial Sound works similarly to JBL’s Spatial Sound and Bose’s Immersive Audio: the headphones’ processor runs a proprietary spatial upmixing algorithm to simulate 3D audio.
Without a universal standard (like the one Sony attempted to popularize), proprietary spatial upmixes tend to be highly inconsistent and often compromise audio quality. There’s no question that Dolby and Apple deliver the superior spatial audio music streaming experience — great things emerge from a closed ecosystem.
I respect Sony’s early and bold commitment to market innovation; it simply couldn’t keep pace with the format war that Dolby was poised to win, with Apple playing a key role in making it happen.
