, Sony's marketing team got in touch with a response from PS5 lead system architect, Mark Cerny, on how the new surround sound set-up actually works. In the Direct, we speculated that the PS5's existing, very impressive Tempest 3D audio data was most likely being recalculated and injected into the Dolby Atmos 'container'.
In his statement, Mark Cerny takes us through the entire audio pipeline in PlayStation 5 and how support has been extended to accommodate the extra speakers that an Atmos set-up supplies. The nature of Sony's solution means that the Atmos support is entirely lag-free, in contrast to some issues we've had with Xbox and Windows PCs.
Ambisonic audio can be viewed as a pretty radical extension of stereo audio. With stereo audio, the game's audio engine will add a sound source into one or both channels based on its location - if the source is to the right of the listener it's primarily added into the right channel, and so on. With Ambisonic audio, there are a lot more channels - fifth order is very common and uses 36 channels, so it allows pretty good locality to the audio.