From Atmos to Stereo – Remixing an Immersive Album in 2 Channels

In this post, I walk through the journey of taking Immersed—a project conceived, recorded, and mixed from day one for Dolby Atmos—and translating it honestly into stereo. For me, the Atmos mix isn’t an “alternate version”; it is the music. Every composition, every microphone choice, every spatial gesture was designed to live in a fully immersive, three-dimensional soundfield. So when it came time to create a stereo version, I had to confront a pretty big question: how do you honor music that was born in 360 degrees when you only have two speakers?

I started, like many of us do, by listening to the Dolby Atmos fold-down. Technically, it worked: all the parts were there, the counterpoint was intact, and nothing was “wrong” in the conventional sense. But when I shared it with my co-producer and violinist, Drew Jurecka, he immediately pointed out what I was too close to hear—the essence of the music was missing. The depth, the front-to-back orchestration, the vertical motion, the way instruments were meant to converse across the room… once collapsed into wide stereo, that whole geometry flattened out. It wasn’t a failure of the technology; it was simply the reality that I had orchestrated for a different medium.

So I did the only thing that felt honest: I wiped the slate clean and remixed the record from the ground up in stereo. We collapsed the routing, removed the Atmos renderer, rethought panning, EQ, reverbs, and layering so the music could breathe in two channels instead of twelve. I leaned into what stereo does best—top-down mixing, bus compression, that subtle “glue” and forward motion you get from a well-built chain—and I refused to treat stereo as a compromised version of Atmos. The goal wasn’t to chase the immersive mix; it was to serve the music in the format it was being heard. In the end, Immersed exists as two primary experiences: the original Atmos vision and a dedicated stereo mix, each crafted intentionally, each with its own strengths, both aimed at preserving the feeling and essence of the music wherever and however you listen.