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Microsoft has been seriously busy recently delivering a flurry of technical improvements to its Xbox One and PC gaming and AV experiences. This has been especially true on the audio side, with Microsoft announcing support for, among other things, DTS:X object-based in-game sound for Xbox and PC, and Dolby Atmos Upmixing for Xbox One. And now it's just revealed yet another welcome upcoming audio trick: options for customizing and personalizing object-based sound on your PC or Xbox One.

Unveiled by Microsoft Audio Lead Steven Wilssens at the recent Game Developers Conference, the new customization features are expected to be introduced to the Dolby Access app at some point in 2019. In fact, the first steps are already available to PC users in the Windows 10 Insider circle.

Xbox uses will have to wait a bit longer, it seems; Wilssens says that his audio team is working to get everything fully functional on the PC before turning their attention to the Xbox One. The feature will come to consoles as well as PCs eventually, though - and when it does, both PC and Xbox users who download the Dolby Access app will be able to tweak the way Dolby Atmos sounds using a variety of options.

For instance, an early version of a Dolby Access customization screen shows new Atmos presets pre-optimized for different types of content: Game, Movie, Music and Voice. Alongside these are three Custom settings, where you can choose the relative sound level at 10 different frequencies to fine tune the Atmos sound to your particular hardware or tastes.

There are also options within the new custom control menus for turning on or off Surround Virtualiser and Volume leveler features - again both potentially useful for optimizing the sound for different sources or listening scenarios.

Providing this sort of control over the exact make up of the Dolby Atmos sound makes perfect sense in today's home entertainment world. After all, Dolby Atmos can now be experienced from a wide variety of content and across a diverse range of audio products - all of which can have their own particular strengths and weaknesses when it comes to delivering the complexities of an Atmos mix.

That said, the new Dolby Access sound customization tools are only currently designed to work with two types of playback device: headphones, and the recently launched Windows PC laptop speaker implementation (available on compatible OEM laptops such as the Lenovo Yoga C930 or Matebook X Pro)

An early version of the new Windows 10/Xbox One Dolby Access customization screen.


The laptop compatibility makes me think the Dolby Atmos customization features might also one day support the new Xbox One Dolby Atmos over TV speaker implementation I wrote about a few days ago. Though to be clear, I don't have any confirmation of this at the time of writing.

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