Top record labels around the world are remixing decades’ worth of music catalogs into Dolby Atmos format. It’s a massive undertaking, but a necessary one if they want those songs to meet requirements for film and TV placement and Atmos streaming services like Tidal and Amazon Music. 

But converting 40-year-old stems into Dolby’s object-based mixing format presents some exciting challenges that require mixing engineers with experienced ears and creative imaginations. These engineers never know what they’re going to find when they open a master that went into the archives long before digital recording was even invented. 

In this Spotlights interview, we sat down with one such engineer. Mills Logan (Toby Keith, Luke Bryan, Josh Turner) tells us how he wound up mixing songs for Atmos, some of the creative and exciting methods he’s come up with to do the job well, and what Dolby Atmos might mean for music listeners in the future.