Dolby Atmos and the (sound) objects of my affection: How Cadillac, AKG, and Maroon 5 helped me enter my spatial-audio era

I was somewhere around East Hollywood, at the onramp of the 101, when the buzz began to take hold. You know the buzz. That indefinable thing when people catch something from music.

I’ve been chasing the buzz for over a year, through SUVs, concert venues, convention centers, and recording studios. From behind the wheel to behind mixing desks. From consoles to consults. I’ve been chasing the buzz while learning how Dolby Atmos and object-based audio have expanded the immersive nature of music.

It’s January 2025. I’m in the front passenger seat of a Cadillac OPTIQ all-electric SUV, foot traffic and metadata swirling around me. But we’re sitting totally still. It’s CES, and we’re parked in the lobby of Dolby Live at Park MGM Las Vegas. It’s not my first listening session in an EV. But it is my first time really hearing what multidimensional in-car entertainment can do, and what this 19-speaker AKG Studio Audio System in particular is capable of. 

Prince’s “When Doves Cry” slinks along the cabin all bathtub seduction and white-column grandeur, before the beat snaps tight and pulls at satin and steam against my skin. Elton John’s “Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going To Be A Long Long Time)” rains down its ephemeral monumentality. Maroon 5’s “Animals” stalks the driver’s seat before the chorus pounces dead-center through the console.

Sure, the AirPods Max 2 can summon some over-the-shoulder falsetto. Sonos speakers and other wireless surround systems can have me high-fiving thin air. But this 7.1.4 AKG system is an even more tangible, well, vehicle for expression. It’s not that everything is louder; it’s that every thing is clearer. I wander into the evening. A tangerine Vegas sunset flares off the Park MGM’s bronze skin like iridescent confetti, my own thoughts reflecting on the potential I’ve just encountered. 

It’s March 2025. I’m at a payphone, trying to call home to catch up and kill time while I wait for friends to find me. It’s a fake photo booth for real photo ops, set up in the lobby of the Park MGM for Maroon 5 fans attending M5LV The Residency. Dolby Live is the largest permanent Atmos installation in the world, and I’ve returned to Las Vegas to find out if spatial audio at a concert is parlor trick or passport. Will it take me deeper into the live experience, or distract me from it? Will it give me new insight into the source material and into what it takes to translate a bespoke bubble to a packed room savoring in sync?

Speaking to me before the show, Mark Tuffy, Dolby’s Director of Business & Strategic Planning for Dolby Atmos for Live, described live performance as the “crescendo” of the music journey: the place where a fan’s connection to an artist becomes most visceral. That helps explain why Dolby’s live-music ambitions landed here in 2021. Las Vegas, he said, is no longer merely a gaming town or a place where performers go to wind down a career, but a contemporary entertainment hub with the right audience, partners, and venues to test Atmos at scale.

If listening in a $55K OPTIQ EV is a private planetarium, Dolby Live is 5,200-seat Big Sky Country. There’s a 400-plus-speaker system broken into acoustic zip codes so that every seat, even under-balcony nooks, gets to experience constellations of sound shimmering across the 140-foot proscenium. All without losing a star. L-Acoustics beam-steered line arrays crawl the walls, cascade from the ceiling, and backfill the balcony, ensuring “every speaker can be the hero,” according to Tuffy. 

This strategic reinforcement forms a halo so that floor-seat fans, banquette bottle service, and upper-tier attendees experience movement no matter where a mixer chooses to fling a meteor shower of cymbal crashes or guitar articulation. Seventy-four subs, which you feel more than hear, lurk overhead, flown around the venue. It’s a place that imagines the future of performance as a space where the record and show stop being separate chapters and finally merge into one looping, luminous verse-chorus-bridge you can inhabit. And, with every zone accounted for, audiences don’t have to accept compromise as part of the ticket price.

“The sound at Dolby Live is my favorite venue I’ve heard,” says Maroon 5 founding member and rhythm guitarist Jesse Carmichael [stage right, below], sharing his perspective at soundcheck. “Sometimes I go to front-of-house and just listen to playback, because it’s literally how I’ve always wanted our band to sound. Throughout our whole career, I’ve gone to front-of-house and come back with wish lists of what could be just a little better. And I don’t feel like I have those same notes for our residency.”

What’s changed isn’t the architecture; it’s the infrastructure. Dolby Atmos reorients how we consume music the same way it has movies. It enables engineers to detach individual elements from the flat plane of stereo and assign them X, Y, and Z coordinates in a three-dimensional field. That frees sound from being merely polite suggestion. It makes it more cognitive. More corporeal. This, in turn, unlocks creativity. Psychoacoustic cues embedded in Atmos mixes stimulate the brain’s spatial awareness systems, creating an active engagement that’s not just emotional but biological. Sounds don’t accompany each other so much as manifest in proximity, beamed through a prism. 

A show like Maroon 5’s is precision-engineered for dopamine delivery, a bubblegum cathedral in a crystalline citadel. Allowing that are mix engineers like Vincent Casamatta and Matt McQuaid, who take feeds from a DiGiCo console for various instruments and another dedicated to vocals, then create subgroups that can be mapped within the Atmos environment. While there are racks of effects and other digital signal processing, what sets the Dolby Live experience apart is the use of the Dolby Renderer and rack components as a tool for real-time routing and calibrated refractions. 

Beyond pre-sequencing scenes, an iPad interface offers hands-on interaction to pan and position audio. You might think that having more control over how and where every instrument can play would be endlessly freeing. But it actually demands even more restraint.

“Since the ’60s and ’70s, you have had to jam all these inputs into this one vertical and you learn tricks to do that, but there can be all this EQ and compression,” explains Casamatta. “And then all of a sudden [in Atmos] you’re just spreading it out and you’re like, oh my god, I can hear everything that’s happening. And that might make some people want to keep pushing [volume] levels but our show we’re hitting curves every night to deliver an average decibel level over the entire evening so the experience isn’t brutal.”

Tuffy puts a finer point on this shift: when instruments are no longer forced to compete through the same narrow corridor, “things don’t have to punch through; things are revealed naturally.” Occupying more distinct positions means less blunt force, no less spectacle.

And it’s not just about asking, should I make this louder? It’s questioning, should I make this looser?!? Spread something like drums across too many hanging speakers and the image and attack will arrive at the audience weirdly timed, dulling the experience despite coming from a “larger” source. Aligning subtleties is physics masquerading as alchemy. You’re not transforming things people know by heart in a way that’s flashy so much as making sure sleek pop harmonies come across as polychromatic, not merely polished.                

The live show’s sense of envelopment mirrors the way Maroon 5’s catalog has been remixed for Apple Music. Tap play on Songs About Jane and you’re inside the vocal booth, Levine’s doubled oh-whoah-whoahs whispering behind you. Is he in your head, or are you in his mouth? All the while, crisp, bone-dry hi-hats tick between drifting riffs and panning licks.

The finesse comes courtesy of Capitol Studios engineers who, Carmichael recalls, finally had “space for all the stuff to breathe.” And, after revisiting the back catalog, Maroon 5 felt emboldened to start the compositional phase natively in Atmos, dialing in parts that travel around the listener, not at them. The process for 2025’s Love Is Like was, according to Carmichael, “approaching a blank canvas and asking where emotion wants to live in three dimensions.”

Of course, it’s easier to have a spatial-from-scratch methodology when your creative “shed out back” is a two-story barn reborn as a Dolby-certified mix facility. It’s April 2025, and I’m at Carmichael’s private Studio City compound in his project studio for hire, nicknamed the Roost [shown below]. I’m sitting on the floated floor in a 9.1.6 control room ringed by JBL M2 mains, ATC SCM25A nearfield monitors, JBL 708p satellites, and Bag End portless subwoofers, among other speakers. It’s a setup Carmichael describes as “sonically pleasing, but not hyped, and above all accurate. It’s a system I can use to listen to music for a long time and it won’t give me ear fatigue whether I’m closely mixing or just doing a gut check.”

Multiple digital audio workstations [DAWs] ride a 96kHz Dante network that lets guest laptops jack into the grid and sling stems to whatever room inspires them that afternoon. Instruments from the vast collection of vintage synths, amps, guitars, drums, mic pres, and more can be tracked and looped via fiber from the live room through outboard dynamics to an ISO booth across the courtyard to an Atmos screening room and back before Uber Eats arrives. Though there is already some great coffee available on site.

Carmichael admits the rig is “over-specified” for solely straight-ahead pop, but that’s the point. He, and Maroon 5, want headroom for surprise, whether it’s while recording or rehearsing. It was in preparation for the residency that they discovered the transient-heavy drums lost punch if sprayed too wide, so kick and snare stay in a traditional L-R pocket while tom flourishes arc like shooting stars. Conversely, a reverb-drenched guitar is perfect object-based bait: attach it to an automation lane and let it swoop to the 200-section—or the equivalent in your AirPods Pro 3—like it does during the solo on Overexposed track “Lucky Strike.” It’s a trick Carmichael says produces “a physical sensation … an emotionally impactful, almost lean-back moment” for the crowd.

Lean-back moments are easier to achieve onstage and in studio because the timecode running at the Roost is the same that’s driving Dolby Live. In pre-production, the band and production crew can choose how much of the Atmos load the console carries versus DAW playback, and the Renderer simply scales objects from any size control room to a speaker coliseum. It’s purpose-built to preserve the logic of placement while leaving room for tailored decisions. The goal is not a disconnected set of listening modes but a continuum: headphones, car, studio, venue. Different rooms, same spatial language.

“Our job is to provide technology that enables creative elements consistently, with scalability,” says Tuffy. Dolby tools aren’t there to dictate what can be done; they’re just a means to ensure it gets done faithfully. He likens it to “partitioning lanes on the freeway.” Some stems joyride and take exit ramps, some hug the center at the speed limit, and some floor it in the Express lanes, but all benefit from the Renderer’s GPS. If the frontman decides to sprint down the ego ramp mid-chorus, snapshot automation can pan the lead vocal with him so the audience hears the sprint happen as they see it, or it can lift a guitar solo above him as an exclamation point.

These beta tests obviously informed Love Is Like, as mixes feature call-and-response choruses that orbit the listener while synths corkscrew. There’s an obvious attempt to recreate how hooks in Dolby Live aren’t just sung but witnessed. Some parts hang at mezzanine height while others throb at thrust level. It’s earworms at auditorium scale, but ones that demand repeat listens. Whereas bands used to hide Easter eggs in the liner notes, now they can do it in the space of the songs themselves.

It’s January 2026, and I’m in Los Angeles, in another studio, one day from being in another Cadillac, perpetually in a euphoric state of multidimensional (re)discovery. 

I’m at Larrabee Studios in North Hollywood, coincidentally the home base of multi-Grammy Award-winning mix engineer Manny Marroquin, who played a part in mixing Maroon 5’s “Love Is Like.” But that’s not why I’m here. I’m actually here at the invitation of Cadillac and HARMAN Professional, the parent company of AKG and a Dolby partner.

A week earlier, at their automotive division in Detroit, HARMAN already primed me for the in-cabin argument. In a car, they said, sound is no longer just entertainment. It’s feedback, mood, even companionship. Increasingly silent EVs and hybrids need some of their soul restored through subtle synthesized cues that rise and fall with throttle, torque, and speed. The point isn’t to fake old engines, but to return the sensation that the vehicle is responding to you. At the same time, the wrong sounds need stripping away: road noise, engine order, cabin clutter, anything that flattens the music riding above it. 

Even HARMAN’s flashier AI demos bent back toward audio. Toward translating vague requests into a listening mood, like letting drivers describe feel instead of fiddling with EQ. Toward imagining a cabin that can hear stress, read context, and adjust the sonic environment accordingly. A cabin where you could assign personal StreamShare zones that cater to different seats and tastes simultaneously via Bluetooth JBL headphones. The through line was simple: the smartest car might also be the most musical one. Not because it serenades you with continual feedback, but because it knows when to add sensation, when to subtract friction, and how to make the whole interior sound more like an experience than a container. Which all sounds similar to the Atmos ethos.

But these HARMAN systems, impressive as they may be, are not why I’m in LA. I’m here to celebrate a new AKG C-Series microphone line, including the price-for-performance studio standout C114 large-diaphragm multi-pattern condenser. And I’m here in celebration of the legendary, nearly 80-year-old transducer manufacturer’s continuing partnership with Cadillac to ensure recordings translate from studio to vehicle with as much fidelity, authenticity, and artist-intent preservation as possible.

We’re given a whirlwind facility tour, marveling at playback on a Meyer Sound 9.1.4 monitor system and Paisley Park-inspired wallpaper, before sitting down for a panel discussion. This is a specific AKG mic launch, but also a general celebration of closing the loop between capture and playback. The new C-Series mics are the front end of the argument, providing flexible tools with wide dynamic range meant to catch an artist’s expression at the source, whether that’s a polished vocal take, a guitar cabinet, a drum kit, or just a rough idea half-forming in a corner of the control room. That’s where environment, microphone placement, and pattern choice change from technicalities into possibilities.

From capsule, a recording makes its way through circuitry, software, material choices, chassis requirements, and human expectations before arriving in the cabin. There, Cadillac is equally obsessed with making sure no texture or emotional voltage is lost in the handoff. The irony of purity has always been how much signal chain it can take to maintain it. And the OPTIQ, as well as the VISTIQ and ESCALADE, are stuffed with digital infrastructure that could either protect or degrade the signal chain. While at the same time being a more damped, time-aligned, and otherwise idealized “listening room” than most people are likely to build at home. But, according to Brandon Wheeler, Director, Acoustic Systems Engineering, HARMAN Automotive, so much can go wrong from source to seat: digital busses, head-unit interaction, app delivery, amplifier software, grille thickness, trim resonance, even the specter of “BSR—buzz, squeak, and rattle.” 

Cadillac’s North Star is to use everything it knows about an SUV’s odd-shaped acoustical reality, gathering all the measurements from static listening positions, to ensure every song bed and sonic object signed off on in the mixing process is delivered without interference. That means optimized algorithms, but more so deliberate design choices. It means obsessing over and isolating where speakers live—instrument-panel corners, A-pillars, proximity to the grille—while resisting the temptation to solve everything with filtering, reinforces Wheeler. Too much DSP, he argues, can take away from the naturalness of things. Cadillac’s endeavor is not to merely sound premium, but to reproduce the details that show you that the money was well spent. If the studio is where expression begins, the car has become a proving ground for whether the performance’s personality survives.

The importance of authenticity, not embellishment, keeps being hammered home, as does the importance of a vehicle that translates rather than enhances a track. That meant consulting mixers early, working with Dolby’s Bryan Pennington to create an Atmos reference room specifically for automotive tuning, outfitting the cars with USB playback so creatives could do their own version of a car check, and tuning the system so the work didn’t fall apart once in transit. 

The proving ground was not merely static. Wheeler stresses that nobody buys a car to sit in the garage and listen to it, which is why days of real driving, not just controlled-room listening, remain part of the speaker system tuning process. While measurement and targets matter, people listen with their ears, not their eyes. Grammy-winning recording and mixing engineer Paul Falcone even describes bringing an Atmos-equipped Cadillac on the streets of Manhattan into his workflow as a reference point while premixing Mariah Carey’s Dolby Live residency. 

As proof that the high-SPL AKG C114’s transparency and headroom wouldn’t be dashed at the dashboard, studio musicians assembled to quickly record and mix two tracks with a box of fresh C114’s for close-miking, room mics, and overheads, plus AKG headphones for monitoring. A couple of hours later, listening to a groove-heavy cover of “Glory Box” by Portishead in the 38-speaker $125K ESCALADE IQ parked just outside the studio’s controlled environment, I found the core of the recording faithful and firm to what had taken place on the other side of the wall. The only thing hyped was intentional: select effects that rippled along the headliner from the ceiling-mounted speakers, all without changing in timbre. 

The Cadillacs have the benefit of direct height speakers, not just up-firing reflections like in more living room wireless surround systems. Custom-tuned speaker arrays delivered mid- and high-frequency information from the same point for coherence, and the Acoustic Lens technology used waveguides instead of windshield ricochets to disperse driver-targeted detail.

However, the real benchmark for success isn’t perfection. It’s whether the artifacts and involuntary details survive—the perfect imperfections that prove the artist felt it, mic caught it, and the playback chain hasn’t fumbled it. Along with proving itself, the ESCALADE’s room-sound reproduction showed that the $229 AKG C114 mic, with its 26mm gold-sputtered dual-diaphragm edge-terminated capsule, punched above its price point for all-around recording without sweetening the work.

The best Atmos presentation doesn’t always mean the most out-there vibe. The studio session showed science in the service of art, or in the service of goosebumps, as Cadillac Chief Engineer John Cockburn puts it.

It’s the next day, driving from the Andaz West Hollywood along the Sunset Strip, then south toward Anaheim. Cadillac and AKG offered me the use of a 23-speaker VISTIQ to go down to the National Association of Music Merchants [NAMM] trade show for a day, where the new AKG mics will be publicly debuted, among other products. And I’m on my way, caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic and relishing it. It just means I have more time with my music. I’ve made a playlist, “good Carma,” full of Dolby Atmos tracks, and I’m idling in denim blue upholstery and invisible tailoring. It’s a personal pleasure dome where precision is sanctified and synth pads might be sentient.

There’s some R.E.M. and the Weeknd, a little Tom Petty and Usher, a smattering of Outkast and New Order, a sprinkle of Flaming Lips and Talking Heads. Some Daft Punk and, of course, some Maroon 5. As woos and hoos, uhhs and huhs fan out from the center, kicks and bass licks pulse from the doors, snares hover in the upper quadrants, and a swell of harmonizing vocals washes forward from rear speakers. 

Even if it’s not quite like being back at Dolby Live, it’s a close second. It makes me wish I never had to go back to my non-immersive automobile. Dolby Atmos is doing its best to, well, render my two-channel life less satisfying. And, while Atmos systems like the AKG are currently reserved for higher trim all-electric SUVs that are not in my budget, interesting aftermarket options are trickling down. As long as artists are still dreaming in color, microphones are still capturing their imagination without skewing the hues, and venues to vehicles are increasingly capable of delivering that vision intact, I’ll continue to lean into the lean-back moments and keep chasing that buzz.

 

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