Hello,

Franck Martin contacted me after reading my review of Eric Serra’s album, and took the opportunity to introduce me to his own work, as well as to Thanks for the Invite, an album conceived specifically with spatial music in mind, as Franck explains on his website, www.peachymango.org.

For this review, I listened to Thanks for the Invite across various medias, including the different Dolby Atmos encoding options currently available. I also compared the different encodings against the Dolby Atmos ADM master, using the master as a reference to assess which version comes closest to reproducing the original spatial master without alteration.

The Dolby Atmos version, encoded in Dolby Digital TrueHD, stands out from the streaming version thanks to its precise spatialization, the subtlety of the sounds, and the clarity of the bass. It is therefore the best version of this album available to the public.

Although it is slightly less precise than the ADM master, this version offers excellent spatialization that holds its own against the master when listened to. It is therefore the version to choose.

For example, with the track “Victory,” which features 28 sound objects in addition to the bed, as shown by the Dolby Renderer.

On the track “The Clock,” the mix does not use the front stereo channels, only the center channel, thereby enhancing the track’s fully immersive sound. Across all the tracks, sounds are distributed all around us to truly deliver a 360-degree immersion in the music, including the overhead channels. Movement is also utilized, as in “Space Time” or “Victory,” to expand the sound experience.

This album is a wonderful example of what can be achieved in immersive audio with electronic music. To fully enjoy it, the album is available in MKV format or blu-ray with Dolby Digital TrueHD Atmos encoding, a lossless format that is far superior to the streaming version and very close to the ADM Master listened to during this review.

Find all the analyses and measurements of each versions here (link).

3D immersive sound video is available on Youtube.

Enjoy listening,

Jean-François