Eclipsa Audio vs. Dolby Atmos: the format fight sound designers can't ignore

For over a decade, "immersive audio" has basically meant one company's name on the spec sheet. That's starting to change. Samsung and Google have spent the past eighteen months quietly building a royalty-free rival to Dolby Atmos, and as of this year it's shipping in real TVs, real soundbars, and real YouTube uploads. If you design sound for film, games, or XR, it's worth understanding what Eclipsa Audio actually is before it shows up as a line item on a delivery spec.

What Eclipsa Audio actually is

Eclipsa Audio is the consumer-facing brand name for IAMF — Immersive Audio Model and Formats — an open specification developed by Google and Samsung and adopted by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) in 2023. AOMedia's membership reads like a who's-who of the streaming and hardware world: Netflix, Meta, Amazon, Arm, and dozens of others sit alongside Google and Samsung on the list, which is part of why Eclipsa has momentum that earlier Atmos challengers never had.

The pitch is straightforward: anyone can create, ship, or play back Eclipsa Audio content without paying licensing or certification fees to use the format itself. Dolby Atmos, by contrast, requires licensing for encoding tools, certification for playback hardware, and royalties baked into the supply chain. That difference in economics is the whole story here — it's not really a sonic rivalry, it's a business-model rivalry that happens to be fought over spatial audio.

How it stacks up technically

An Eclipsa Audio bitstream can currently carry up to 28 input channels, compressed with the open-source Opus codec, and rendered to whatever the playback device actually has — soundbar, TV speakers, headphones, or a full home theater array. The format supports both channel-based beds (5.1.2, 7.1.4, and similar configurations) and, notably for this audience, scene-based audio: full ambisonic soundfields can be carried as a native audio element rather than bolted on as an afterthought. Google's own documentation walks through a YouTube example built from 3rd-order ambisonics for ambient sound plus a stereo dialogue layer — 18 channels total, mixed and rendered through the format's standard tools.

That's a genuinely different posture than Atmos, which is fundamentally an object-based system that treats ambisonic content as something to convert into, not a first-class citizen. If you're already delivering B-format or higher-order ambisonic beds, Eclipsa's pipeline is closer to a native fit than a workaround.

IAMF 2.0, expected to land soon, adds object-based audio on top of the existing scene- and channel-based support, which closes most of the remaining functional gap with Atmos and should raise the channel ceiling further. At that point the format argument stops being "open but limited" and becomes a more direct head-to-head comparison.

Where it's actually showing up right now

This isn't vaporware. YouTube has accepted Eclipsa Audio uploads since early this year. Samsung's TV and soundbar lineup ships with native decoding, and Harman's stable of brands — JBL, Harman Kardon, Denon, Marantz — are bringing support across their AV receivers and speakers. Eclipsa is also being embedded directly into Google TV and Android, which pulls in TCL, Hisense, and Philips hardware without those manufacturers needing to do much extra work. A certification program launched in October to standardize quality across devices, and Google has released an open-source DAW plugin (Pro Tools and other NLE workflows) so the format can be authored without proprietary tools.

What's still missing is the deep studio-pipeline integration and brand recognition Atmos has built over more than a decade. Most consumers have never heard of Eclipsa. Most post houses aren't asking for it yet. That gap is real, and it's not closing overnight.

What this means for your workflow

Realistically, nobody needs to rip out an Atmos pipeline this year. But there are a few practical reasons to start paying attention now rather than later:

Eclipsa's native ambisonics support means field-recorded and studio-designed ambisonic beds — the kind of work this lab already specializes in — map onto the format with very little translation overhead. That's worth knowing if a client ever asks whether your deliverables can target it.

The royalty-free model is going to be attractive to smaller platforms, indie game studios, and anyone shipping hardware at scale, which means demand could show up from directions Atmos historically didn't reach — budget soundbars, mobile devices, browser-based playback. Google's binaural web demo and open renderer mean Eclipsa content can be auditioned without specialized gear, which lowers the barrier for clients to ask for it.

And because IAMF is genuinely open, the tooling is likely to evolve faster and cheaper than a licensed ecosystem ever could. Studios that get comfortable with the format early aren't betting against Atmos — they're just adding a second fluent language to their delivery options.

The honest verdict

Dolby Atmos isn't going anywhere. The installed base, the content library, and the brand recognition are too large for any open challenger to dislodge quickly. But Eclipsa Audio is the first format in years with the right combination of big-company backing, zero licensing friction, and genuinely native ambisonics support to actually matter for working sound designers. The smart move isn't picking a side — it's understanding both well enough to deliver whichever one a project needs.

If you're building out an ambisonic toolkit and want a practical starting point, axisambisoniclab.com has a free starter pack to get you working in true spatial audio formats today.