CES 2025: Dolby Atmos rival Eclipsa Audio to launch this year
The first open-source, freely available true 3D sound solution for creators is now official, coming to YouTube and Samsung devices first
KOSTAS FARKONAS
PublishED: January 10, 2025

Competition within practically any market can help move things along faster and raise the quality bar of technologies, products or services, benefitting consumers – especially when the current dominant option in any given market is proprietary, inviting competition from open source alternatives. The 3D audio market has been in dire need of such an alternative to Dolby Atmos for years, which is why many members of the creative community were excited to see Samsung and Google announce the IAMF initiative (Immersive Audio Model and Formats) in late 2023. Nothing else was shared about it in 2024, though, leading many to believe that IAMF would not amount to much after all despite Google’s and Samsung’s involvement.
That’s fortunately not the case. Just ahead of CES 2025 Samsung and Google jointly announced Eclipsa Audio, which is the brand name they settled on for the open-source, freely available Dolby Atmos alternative they’ve been working on. Eclipsa Audio will strive to offer a similar multi-channel, object-based, immersive audio experience that takes into account sound location, intensity and spatial reflections in order to build a convincing “sphere of sound” around the listener. The difference being that creators can use the Eclipsa standard without paying royalties to anyone, unlike what they have to do when working with Atmos and Dolby’s tools.

According to Samsung and Google, creators will be able to upload Eclipsa-compatible video on YouTube later this year, which owners of Samsung TVs and soundbars will be able to enjoy with full 3D audio. The catch here is that these will only be Samsung products (and 2025 models at that), despite Eclipsa having been accepted as a sound format by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) which Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Netflix are also members of. Samsung is a major player in the home entertainment market and a valuable partner for Eclipsa Audio at this early stage, but this exclusivity may hurt this new standard’s chances of being adopted at a faster pace.
Samsung’s involvement in this project is, of course, no coincidence: the Koreans have made it very clear over the years that they do not wish to pay royalties to Dolby for using its Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos technologies. It’s the reason why none of the numerous Samsung TVs out there supports Dolby Vision and the reason why Samsung promotes its own, open-source HDR standard (HDR10 Plus) instead. The company only begrudgingly supported Dolby Atmos in 2023 – no quality soundbar could hope to succeed in the market without it at this point – and it now seems that Samsung would prefer not doing that too, promoting Eclipsa instead.

The press release Samsung shared is almost suspiciously light on technical details and several outlets have already reported that the company does not seem all that excited to talk about Eclipsa Audio (not at this point in time at least). People interested in what they can expect on Eclipsa in terms of features, codecs and performance can learn more by going through ARM’s official blog post – plus, yours truly is guessing that most of what’s mentioned in the final IAMF spec sheet over at GitHub is also valid (albeit highly technical). Oddly enough, Google itself has not published anything of note on Eclipsa Audio yet, but something may crop up in the official YouTube blog at some point.
It’s fair to say that even if Samsung and Google had executed the perfect launch plan for Eclipsa Audio in CES 2025, it would still be incredibly hard for this new standard to be seen as a serious threat to Dolby Atmos or even a true alternative to it short-term. Not only is Dolby’s standard widely supported when it comes to streaming services and Blu-ray/UHD Blu-ray releases, not only is it the most commonly supported standard when it comes to consumer electronics, it is also deeply entrenched in the creative process of most film studios and TV networks for years now. It is established to such a degree that the only other proprietary standard that can work as an alternative, DTS:X, is but a distant second in terms of content support without being technically inferior.

The industry does need a capable alternative to Dolby Atmos that creators can use for free, though, so here’s hope that Google and Samsung get their act together in order to promote Eclipsa Audio sooner rather than later. If history is any indication, it often takes a long time for open-source standards to gain proper industry support: it took HDR10 Plus more than five years, for instance, or the AV1 codec more than four years, to be widely adopted by manufacturers and content delivery platforms. That is way too long for YouTube – which does not support Dolby Atmos – to keep becoming more and more popular without offering true 3D audio, no?