IRCAM Spat Revolution vs Dolby Atmos Production

Indeed Dolby Atmos Music with the online distribution services for independent artists has triggered some conversations lately. More importantly, since Dolby is putting a focus on music. Some questions around the subject often come up around me. People are trying to understand major differences in terms of FLUX:: Immersive Spat Revolution vs the Dolby Atmos Production Tools as object-based audio software. Being for music production, sound design or anything above. 
Can both these production tools be compared? Advantages?  This article takes the angle of Spat Revolution, the standalone application (with its integration plugin suite) and how it differs from Dolby Atmos Tools.  Maybe some of this article will help demystify the hype – The object-based immersive production hype!
At the base and in my view, Dolby Atmos is more of a proposed workflow (there’s nothing wrong with workflows though), and a specific deliverable for Dolby Atmos arrangements. They offer integration with selected DAWs, where Spat Revolution intends to offer wider options with more plugin formats supported. Granted part of the Dolby offer is the ability to create an ADM master, something that is a recognized proposed standard and agnostic of the actual format (the object base mix itself). More on this later.
Dolby (and others) are a commercial proposal where much has to do with licensing, example: the streaming/distribution services to be able to deliver Dolby content. Sony Music has their approach here as well for delivering Sony 360 content on various platforms. This is a key spin on these proposals.
Major differences can be found between Spat Revolution and Dolby Atmos production tools, although I wouldn’t want to bluntly say that one sounds better than the other. Let’s just say that the 30 years of Ircam expertise and research behind Spat is making it a very high-level technology. The two are simply different beasts. One beast is just more agile than the other. I’ll let you conclude which one.
Dolby Atmos Production Tools is ultimately an object mixing renderer that outputs a specific speaker arrangement family (Atmos), whereas in Spat you have all the flexibilities here. Pre-defined common arrangements to complete custom ones. 64 channels support in Spat Revolution. This simply means that you can create for various deliverables. Up to a custom immersive installation.
Monitoring your object-based mix in a different environment than the deliverable is very much possible with Spat Revolution (for when you have a smaller or larger monitoring setup). An example is, you can monitor on your available system (done in a separate virtual room with a different format but with the same object mix), while rendering in parallel your actual deliverable (being an Atmos mix or anything else you need). Part of monitoring potentially brings the need, or want, to virtualize on headphone any speaker arrangements you are creating for. This is fully flexible with the binaural monitoring.
We can as well highlight more possibilities with binaural overall, like dealing with HRTF libraries, personalized HRTF, various binaural modes, some not around HRTF, such as Snowman and Spherical models. Dolby does offer some binaural implementation too, and has lately worked on this front facing the reality of our audience being isolated on headphones more than ever.
Talking about the panning algorithms, our understanding and experience is that Dolby doesn’t use a VBAP panning (something that is commonly used around), rather they go for something more forgivable such as a layer-based approach (LBAP in Spat). When dealing with dynamic objects and elevation, the triangulation in 3D VBP can sometimes be challenging with non-uniform systems. An LBAP approach can be more forgiving. In all cases, a wide variety of panning options are found in Spat, where Dolby is a fixed panning model. I might mention that both layer-based approaches may not be *exactly* the same.
We can say that Dolby is about a panning tool, where Spat Revolution welcomes room acoustic simulation (reverberation) to the virtual spaces where the object mix is done. Much is on how sound is perceived in the real-world, and the room effect of Spat comes to reinforce the localization amongst other things. (Simply think about the possibility to localize the simulated early reflections of each source object). We can say that Spat goes deeper in source/object properties (perceptual parameters and many other options beyond object position). You can use as little or as much as wanted.
Ultimately, Spat will allow you to create any deliverables. Being an Atmos, a Sony, a DTS, a Dome – sound installation. For that matter of fact, a scene based ambisonic deliverable distributed to be decoded down the line (agnostic of the speaker system as a deliverable).
Talking about agnostic deliverables (channel-based or renderer agnostic), Dolby supports exporting an ADM master from your audio creation workflow. This means that you can for example import this object-based mix (ADM BWF.wav audio file with metadata) into a tool such as the Ircam ADMix player and render the various formats with the various technologies. The OSC integration in this player allows driving the objects (the dynamic or static objects) in the external renderer. We in our team have done this with Spat Revolution acting as that external renderer. 
Thanks to the ADM-OSC initiative FLUX:: has had the pleasure to be part of, some DAWs now support the integration of external renderers in a sweeter method. This was added by Nuendo and Merging Technologies at the end of last year, and this is expected to grow. With this, the renderer, such as Spat Revolution, have a true nice bidirectional communication with the DAW panner, and as a few DAWs can import ADM masters, you end up with an object-based mixing environment that is renderer format agnostic (even if the original creation was made in the Dolby environment). This initiative started for the live production side of the immersive wave! From audio capture to live broadcast workflow (where OSC is the main protocol in this industry already). 

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