We already knew that the new Eclipsa Audio surround sound format developed by Google and Samsung will be supported on the latter company’s 2025 TVs and soundbars, and now we’re hearing that it will be available on many more devices soon.
Eclipsa Audio is a rival technology to Dolby’s proprietary immersive audio format Dolby Atmos, and it has been in the making for many years. Samsung first revealed it was working with Google to develop the new format it way back in 2020, and it later said much more about it in 2023.
However, it was only at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in January that they announced it’s finally ready for prime-time, saying it will debut on Samsung’s TVs and soundbars when they launch later in 2025.
Eclipsa Audio is somewhat similar to the HDR10+ high dynamic range format in that it’s open-source and therefore free to use by any content creator or device manufacturer, without paying any licensing fees. Moreover, it’s a standalone technology that doesn't need to be bundled with any other.
One notable difference between Eclipsa Audio and Dolby Atmos is that the newer tech is not object-based, but rather channel-based. It supports first- and third-order “ambisonics” that make it possible to generate a 3D audio soundscape. It can handle as many as 28 input channels, which are rendered to whatever output speakers or headphones are being used.
It all sounds very exciting, but like all new technologies it needs to gain traction among device manufacturers if people are actually going to benefit from it. Fortunately, Google and Samsung are making progress there. A report in FlatPanels HD say quotes a spokesperson from Google as saying that Eclipsa Audio will be fully supported at the operating system level on all Google TV devices powered by Android 16, which is the latest version of its iconic operating system, set to launch later this year.
Some of the brands that currently sell Google TVs include Sony, Philips, Hisense and TCL, so, with any luck, we should see Eclipsa Audio arriving on quite a few high-end TVs soon. The only question is exactly when. Android 16 is currently in the beta testing phase, and the full version is expected to arrive some time during the second quarter. But it’s not clear yet if any major TV brands will adopt the latest version of the OS, or instead stick with Android 15 this year. So it may not be until next year that we see the first non-Samsung TVs with Eclipsa Audio.
On the other hand, Google said it’s also planning to bring Eclipsa Audio support to mobile devices and web browsers, but again we don’t know exactly when that will happen.
The other question is how much content will actually support Eclipsa Audio. Right now, there’s very little if any content that it will actually work with, though Google is doing its best to encourage YouTube content creators to embrace the new format.
Although Eclipsa Audio was announced at CES, neither Google nor Samsung has yet allowed anyone to listen to the 3D audio format, so we’ve no idea how it compares to Dolby Atmos at this point.
