Making waves at CES 2025, Eclipsa Audio is set to be a major win for 3D audio enthusiasts. The Dolby Atmos counterpart, built on Immersive Audio Model and Formats (IAMF), aims not only to make audio more immersive across devices and TVs but also give creators and engineers alike more freedom in the way users experience sound in everything from conventional movies to YouTube videos.
Earlier this year, Google announced Eclipsa's debut on Android devices like the Galaxy Buds 3 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra thanks to an Android Open Source Project (AOSP) slated for sometime later this year. Now, however, according to FlatpanelsHD the Dolby Atmos rival is said to be landing on even more devices including Google TVs made by TCL and Hisense, as well as LG TVs like the LG G5 OLED.
And the best part? It's totally free.
It's unclear when exactly these brands might see the new audio format, but it will be built directly into Android 16 with Google initially focusing on TVs, soundbars and interface support. Eclipsa is also bound for Google Chromecast devices as well as AV receivers, though you may have to wait a bit before these come to fruition.
Eclipsa expands across more devices
The open source 3D audio spec, which directly challenges Dolby Atmos, works in a slightly different way than its rival, using channel-based audio as opposed to object-based audio. It's also codec-agnostic, ensuring it works across the range of different encoders, from AAC and LPCM to Opus and FLAC (and beyond).
Google's already announced its inevitable support on YouTube, and Samsung hyped the unveiling of Eclipsa Audio on its 2025 sets, which are bound for release sometime in late April or May. But now it seems even more TVs and devices will be implementing the 3D audio tech, namely some of the best Google TVs, including Hisense and TCL models, LG TVs, and Android 16 devices.
Although Google is focusing on TVs, OS support, and soundbars at this time, it did note future support bound for AV receivers and is working on implementing it with VLC, the open source media player. The tech giant highlighted a forthcoming spring release of an Eclipsa Audio plugin for AVID Pro Tools Digital Audio Workstation, software that's used primarily for music creation, sound recording, and audio mixing.
Mums the world right now in terms of both iOS and tvOS support, but Google did relay to FlatpanelsHD that it "could not comment on Apple's plans" at the time.
