Dolby Atmos is the default Spatial Audio format on iOS and while it is well suited for music and film we found it didn’t work so well for our specific goal of recreating natural outdoor ambient experiences. Instead, we partnered with Atmoky, a world-leading Spatial Audio R&D company, to deploy a custom format which uses higher order Ambisonics (often used for VR) that are better suited for our purposes.

The Portal App renders the spatial audio itself and passes the output directly to your headphones. As a result, the Control Center toggle will appear to indicate that Spatial Audio is disabled.