Slashdot Mirror
Will Dolby's New Atmos 62.2 Format Redefine Surround Sound?
CIStud writes "Anyone who goes to see Pixar's new animated Brave film might come home with their ears ringing. Why? because Brave is the debut of Dolby Lab's new 62.2 surround sound format called Atmos, which adds new developments such as pan-through array and overhead speakers. With 62 speakers and 2 subwoofers, only a handful of theaters nationwide will be able to show the film at its full throttle. Dolby has produced a new highly informative video that talks about how movie sound has progressed from mono to stereo to LCR (left/center/right) to 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound and now Atmos. The big question is will the 62.2 format system be adapted for home theaters intent on emulating the immersive movie experience?" I've seen some busy input/output panels on home stereo equipment, but 62 channels is too many for my interconnect budget. Still, overhead sound seems like a good idea for some kinds of movie.
let's see sound fee on top the 3d fee ontop of others fees and do you want a $4 coke with that?
Why does this remind me of the spoof commercial I saw somewhere for the 12 blade facial razor, for the ultimate in close shaves? The thing looked like a damn textbook attached to a Bic razor handle. 62 speakers sound like extreme overkill in any environment outside a professional theater.
send....more.....speaker.........wire.
But does the volume go to eleven ?
So many voices to hear, and only two ears to hear them with.
If someone starts making rips of this, it will probably be the first time that the video bit rate will be dwarfed by audio bit rate. PC playback put aside, I don't see any chance of consumer hardware being produced to play back that many channels, which means media won't be released for this system, which means any source for this sound will probably be questionable in origin. So I don't think anyone will need to worry about the necessity of upgrading their home theaters in near future.
Ezekiel 23:20
As long as you connect it with this http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B000I1X6PM
and all of it would be done so much better with a pair headphones. Recordings done with a dummy head microphones inside the ears sound creepy realistic in headphones
$4 Coke?! Fill me in with your discount method!
the only way i could think of wiering is ot use powered speakers. and everything uses ethernet.
so you dont have 1 big revicer with an amplifier, you end up with a digital switch then sends the data out on etheret to all the self powerd speakers.
only in the last step is the Digital to analog happen...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
is this is overkill. The gut speakers are hard to swallow and technicians say the kidneys speakers are particularly difficult to install.
What I really want is a system that prevents me from hearing other folks cough, laugh at the wrong moment, or left their cell phone on ring.
And some will be listening to their ipod or speaking on their iphone during the movie anyway.
If you buy one and have it refilled about 12 times, then it equates to $4 a Coke.
After a bit of digging, I found a list of the Atmos locations, and it's barely a handful:
http://www.dolby.com/us/en/professional/technology/cinema/dolby-atmos.html#Locations
If you're on the US east coast, there doesn't look to be a theatre between New Jersey and Florida ... so most of us won't get a chance to find out if it's worth it. (and as one of those people w/ poor vision ... this I'd be interested in ... 3D video, not so much)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
My Yamaha sound projector (YSP-1000) has 42 speakers, plus a subwoofer, for 42.1, and no wires. :)
The standard probably has fewer than 62 individual audio channels, and probably specifies some sort of way to position and mix many audio streams among many different speakers or groups of speakers.
*sound of crickets*
Didn't think so. Best forgotten anyway.
Plain and simple, it will be forgotten in 6 months,
Yet another gimmick to try to get people to return to the theaters. And again, we all say, "Just make better movies."
sig: sauer
...considering Bose have single-driver units that fill a room, and I have a pair of headphones made by Angle & Curve (with one driver either side) which, with the softHD sound processor in my netbook, gives me "virtual" surround that sounds every bit as good as my acoustically balanced 5.1 PC setup.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
...ought to be enough for anybody.
Ambisonics
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Of course this is a death proof car, I didn't lie to you about that. But, to actually gain benefit of it being death proof, you have to be sitting... where I'm sitting!
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
The future of "super" sound is a set of headphones that give the listener exactly the sound the engineer wants him to hear.
Oh, and maybe a couple of bone-vibrators thrown in as well.
In the far future, when we all have brain implants, our Audio Engineering Overlords will do whatever they like to the audio-processing portions of our brains, and we will welcome it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This reminds me of the story of Magic Alex from the Beatles Anthology. He was an electronics geek friend of the band back when they were burning through money via their company, Apple that designed a revolutionary 16 track recording studio for the band in late 1968. The control room contained 16 little speakers, one for each track. It was a travesty in every other send of electrical and audio engineering, based on claims from the EMI audio engineers who patiently waited for their chance to step back in restore order once Alex was fired.
Imagine how many gold plated Monster Cables are they gonna sell?? We're all in the wrong business!
let's see sound fee on top the 3d fee ontop of others fees and do you want a $4 coke with that?
You throw a bug into it and they knock half off when you show them the cockroach doing the backstroke.
But it's still full price for the popcorn with genuine simulated butter kinda-sorta-flavored grease which puts you in mind of melted crayons
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I know this is halfway a joke but don't you people have souvenir cups where you are? Harkins theaters here in the Phoenix area, and I assume company-wide, have a new cup every year. It is a large size plastic cup that is about $1.00-$1.50 more than a regular cup but only costs $1 to refill for the rest of the year. If you refill it once it is worth it. The only thing is that you have to remember to take it with you, but after awhile it becomes habit.
The Sontarans are going to get Atmos installed everywhere and use it to kill off people who get in their way and then, finally, use the large number of installed systems to poison our atmosphere so they can use the Earth as a cloning facility! ...See, it's a Doctor Who reference. I like that show.
Bow-ties are cool.
Waterworld had crazy-good sound (lots of realistic splashes and somesuch)
Dolby should work on Plotmos to deliver better plots and screenplays to Hollywood or use plot-o-matic
http://www.maddogproductions.com/plotomatic.htm
my great movie idea:
---
Summer Action
an original screenplay concept
by Biff Biffalo
Political thriller: A sexy district attorney teams up with an alcoholic ex-CIA agent to commit the perfect crime. In the process they accidentally kill a super intelligent chimpanzee. By the end of the movie they burn 7 ewoks and end up winning the admiration of their manager, living happily ever after.
Think Ernest Goes to Camp meets Star Wars.
---
First of all, the video is only on the screen in front of you. It's like a window (the real thing, not a Redmond POS) into the "world" the movie is presenting. So how in heck would sounds from that world emanate from above or behind you? I find it quite distracting. :-)
Second: "natural" sounds like speech, the car driving down a road in the video, or the orchestra performing on stage (in the video) are not all that localized, and don't need to be. We see the image and locate the sound source to match. Putting in 62 sources just lets some audio nerd create a synthetic, moving, sound front that would never occur in nature. Unless you had a very loud bee flying in a tight cirle around your head
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I find it funny that you're assuming free refills.
Two channels for subs? Why? Bass is non directional. It's one thing to have multiple subs on one channel, but it doesn't make sense to have a 2nd channel.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
>Still, overhead sound seems like a good idea for some kinds of movie.
What kind of movie would that be? I already think the surround audio is overdoing it, since your attention is supposed to be right at the screen, not wondering what's behind you.
Recently watched Naussica Of The Valley Of Wind in a local theater, and I'm not sure the sound was even stero; all sound seemed to come from speakers behind the screen. But I didn't care, because it was an awesome movie, with good visuals and audio effects. Some of the music may be questionable, but the orchestral stuff was still tear-inducing.
NS:DC (Not Surround: DIdin't Care)
That's not how this system works, it supports "up to" 62 channels in the encoded signal; these are panned with metadata in the channel bitstream, and then the decoder in the theater (or home) does the math of placing the sound in the space, using prior knowledge of how many speakers you have, and their position in the room. "62.2" doesn't mean 64 speakers, it means that the format supports "up to" that many, and the theater might not have that many actual channels wired, or it might have significantly more if it's a large room, or significantly less -- they can add more speakers to get more directional resolution.
62.2 also doesn't imply that the guy who mixed the thing was using more than 5 or 6. I'm a sound designer in Los Angeles -- just finished Men in Black 3, starting Zero Dark Thirty in a few weeks, and this is the first time I've heard of any of this. This sort of system will require software support from workstation and console vendors, and I'm dubious people will be using it for some time, even though it promises great backwards-compatiblity.
This system appears to be an attempt to get ambisonic-like flexibility without the costs of ambisonics, principally, ambisonic encoding's inability to cope with pan divergence, the problem of "how do I send the same sound to the left and right side of the rooms simultaneously, without it going anywhere else?" It's impossible to do this in ambisonics without adding tons of second-order channels and playing with signal phase. This system might also suffer from one of ambisonic's other problems, namely, it may rely on extremely accurate speaker placement and speaker placement information.
This system also appears to be a shot across the bow of IOSONO, which is a very different process that achieves high horizontal fidelity through a completely different technique of dubious creative utility.
Note- IMAX has overhead sound as well, or at least a "screen-top" channel, but lacks a subwoofer channel and only has point-source surround speakers.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Does this mean I have to upgrade from my year-old-still-unscratched 9.2 receiver already?!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Haven't been to the theater in years (I guess when Return of the King came out). I was under the impression that movie theaters had more than 7.1 discrete speakers.
Why haven't theaters progressed beyond the sound setups available to home aficionados decades ago? Or am I missing something?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I've heard this at Dolby's screening room in SF. It looks like a modest auditorium. It's really a money-is-no-object demo facility. Before a talk on another subject, the Dolby guys couldn't resist showing off. They had a video game with many directional sound outputs hooked into the room's systems, and you could hear the players moving around in the space, behind and above the audience when appropriate. You really can hear somebody sneaking up on you in-game from a platform above you.
It's an experience to hear many-channel sound in a facility like that, but few (if any) commercial theaters are that good acoustically. Unless the room acoustics are very, very good, all those channels won't help much.
The reason people aren't going to movies anymore isn't because sound isn't immersion enough, or that your chair doesn't move (D-box), or that the screen isn't as big as the side of skyscraper (IMAX). Prices are too high, so you can just wait 6 months and buy a 1080p version of the film for the same price as a ticket and watch it at home. I have a big-screen lcd tv with surround sound, why would I go to the movies when my at home experience is equal? Not to mention not having to deal with crowds, and outrageous prices on oversized popcorn/soda.
$4 Coke?! Fill me in with your discount method!
Move out of your expensive city. I'm twice as rich as someone 200 miles away in Chicago who earns the same salary as me, because everything costs twice as much up there (or more). Someone making my salary in New York City would probably be living in a cardboard box, but I live a comfortable middle class life here in Springfield.
I don't know what a Coke costs at a movie, but in a thread a while back a bunch of people pegged me as being a cheapass for leaving a quarter tip for a draft beer -- which I pay $1.25 for. That's a 20% tip, but everyone assumed I was paying five bucks for one like they do in Chicago.
Getting a little more on topic here, TFA was incredibly useless; youtube is firewalled off here. What is it with the lack of literacy these days? I don't absorb spoken information nearly as well as written information, TFA doesn't even say how many channels this is, where the speakers are placed, or anything. It does mention two "subwoofers" (we used to call 'em woofers in the stone age when every speaker enclosure had one, many of them fifteen inces or bigger, I've seen "subwoofers" only five inches across) and that's about it.
I've been putting down surround sound since the '70s when they first trotted out quadrophonics for home stereos. You needed two of everything but the turntable, including speakers (the most expensive part) plus a demodulator. And who sits in the middle of an orchestra to hear the symphony? In theaters it's just annoying when a phone rings from the exit sign two meters to the right of the screen (Gran Torino), and even worse when something explodes behind you (Star Wars V), destroying the immersion. I maintain that a movie only needs four channels, one at each corner of the screen.
Is 62.2 sixty two channels plus two woofers? I don't see how this would sound any more realistic than a channel for each corner.
Free Martian Whores!
I want something close to this for gaming! It'd be nice to play ANYTHING with a high-level of detail to ambient sounds.
Here is the list of theaters currently equipped with Dolby Atmos 62.2 Surround Sound
AMC BarryWoods 24 (Kansas City, MO)
AMC Burbank 16 (Burbank, CA)
AMC Century City 15 (Century City, CA)
AMC Downtown Disney 24 (Lake Buena Vista, FL)
AMC Garden State 16 (Paramus, NJ)
AMC Van Ness 14 (San Francisco, CA)
ArcLight Sherman Oaks (Sherman Oaks, CA)
Brenden Theatres at the Palms (Las Vegas, NV)
Century at Pacific Commons and XD (Fremont, CA)
Cinemark West Plano and XD (West Plano, TX)
SilverCity-Yonge Eglington Cinemas (Cineplex) (Toronto, ON)
Cinetopia Vancouver Mall 23 (Vancouver, WA)
El Capitan Theatre (Hollywood, CA)
Kerasotes ShowPlace ICON at Roosevelt Collection (Chicago, IL)
In a word: No. All the theaters around here are UA or Century and they're all I believe 6.75 for either a large popcorn or soda (4.75 is I believe the small now. I haven't been in at least a year and I only went then due to some hallucinations involving a girlfriend. :D)
Regardless no collectors cups, I'm not sure about the refills (I believe only the large or XL popcorn cups, either no or a few dollar for a drink).
Combined that with sticky floors and noisy people and it's almost like going to a porn theater.
a use for 216-pin Harting connectors in my living room.
Home theaters are generally setup in small enough rooms that even a 5.1 system is very immersive. Having upgraded from 5.1 to 7.1 to 9.2 in the last year, the immersiveness has improved but, it's incremental enough that I can't imagine and wouldn't even encourage most people bothering with it. Having extra speakers on the z and y axises (height and wide channels) will make some movie scenes more impressive but, in general, it's ambient noises that come out of those channels and, if you already have a properly setup and calibrated 5.1 system with even moderately priced speakers, most of the time you won't notice much of a difference.
As for having speakers on the ceiling, that's completely pointless for a home theater. Having height channels (PLIIz/DSX/DTS:Neo) a few feet above your front speakers is sufficient to give your ear the impression that things are happening directly above you. Just like side surrounds can play phase tricks on your ears to make you think something is happening directly behind you, height channels can make things sound like they are directly above you. And this technology is already available on mid-priced 7.1 receivers.
Ahem... Sixty-four speakers. Don't forget about the subs.
... And so it comes to this.
I think it's absolutely brilliant. Of course, nobody will actually be able to tell a difference, but if the price tag is large enough, people will think they hear a difference, and buy, buy, buy. Good for Dolby for keeping the dumb American public spending.
Personally, I use stereo. It sounds really great. I don't need 5,7,or 62 speakers, even if I happen to be watching some gimmicky movies with lots of explosions that happen "behind" me. The only bad part of this technology, as it effects me, is that it's getting harder and harder to buy amps and speakers that are good quality stereo.
I don't respond to AC's.
like 2 speakers (left +right) and 62 subwoofers
$4 Coke?! Fill me in with your discount method!
Move out of your expensive city. I'm twice as rich as someone 200 miles away in Chicago who earns the same salary as me, because everything costs twice as much up there (or more). Someone making my salary in New York City would probably be living in a cardboard box, but I live a comfortable middle class life here in Springfield.
You're probably exaggerating a bit. I moved out of an expensive area into a rural area. Housing is about half and I actually have some acreage to go with it, but realistically everything else is similar. Food, clothes, etc are all about the same. It's the other non tangibles that caused me to move, like living somewhere the kids can roam the neighborhood safely, zero traffic, etc.
The last theater I went to offered free refills on the large size. Smalls and medium didn't get free refills. Refills are useless though, I'm not going to leave the theater to get one and miss part of the movie.
Found this on Dolby's website for the Atmos system:
http://www.dolby.com/uploadedFiles/Assets/US/Doc/Professional/Dolby-Atmos-Cinema-Technical-Guidelines.pdf
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
Actually would make my cable setup look a little light and i have several Quad inputs and outputs, twin EQs, 4-channel dolby box, and several quad tape decks (including a Quad 8-track recorder) plus a couple switched inputs for the TV,etc. It takes me 2 days to rewire and 62.2 sounds a little crazy ;) Can already get sound to go around the room, i suppose a couple channels for overhead would be good for movies.
Patch cables are cheaper by the gross tho ... should add a couple more channels to use em up !
This is insanity.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
[I]t's still full price for the popcorn with genuine simulated butter kinda-sorta-flavored grease which puts you in mind of melted crayons
The "butter" flavor is already there in that salty yellow powder. The "butter" that's applied when you request butter is simply heated canola oil.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Why not just start making better movies, as in having more interesting storylines.
I couldn't care less about the audio. Mono audio is perfectly fine for me. So long as the speakers' frequency range is good and bass is boosted, I'm perfectly fine with anything. In games I need stereo so that I can at least tell where sound is coming from, but in movies? Fuck that!
As a teen I worked concessions at large theater. "Butter" was indeed grease from 5 gallon jugs. Nacho "cheese" was something thick and yellow that was not cheese. Hot dogs often had green stuff on them when they came out of the box, but the green was covered by accumulated gunk (we called it seasoning) from the rollers of the heater, and could make the trip between freezer and rollers several times before purchase.
If it's not prepackaged, be afraid. Be very afraid.
> Getting a little more on topic here, TFA was incredibly useless; youtube is firewalled off here
You may be twice as rich but here in Chicago my work doesn't firewall me from youtube. Plus I'm going this weekend to see this movie at a theater conveniently located close to my house with atmos 62.2.
I'm not going to be impressed until they put speakers in the seats. That way i will get a genuine feeling of being raped by the theaters and their ticket/drinks/food prices.
.
Adding speakers means there is no way this sucker is going to be quieter than the other sound systems.
How many soccer moms will be loading the theater with children so they may be blasted with ludicrously high levels of audio waves? It is already a criminal act, IMO.
I come here for the love
The advantage of this is on the technical side, and it's for those who mix the sound. Watch the middle of the video again. With the sounds being object oriented they only have to make *one* mix. When it is passed down to the theater they present the mix as they can with what they have. This is quite brilliant from a workflow perspective and can end up saving studios money as they theoretically shouldn't need to waste time testing and optimizing the downmixes anymore (except for other formats like DTS).
Sure the gimmick factor is still there but hell I'd love to hear it in a true IMAX theater.
Human beings have only 2 ears. Most of the sound comes in through the ear canal. Thus, the way you perceive direction has both to do with having 2 ears, and also the ability to move your head.
Stereo sound gives you directionality for the first bit, but not the second. Wouldn't a pair of very high quality headphones with a head position sensor allow you to hear movies in the full 62.2 format without needing $50,000 worth of equipment? Very high quality headphones with a good sensor might cost $100-$200 a pair, and obviously you'd need a monstrous rack of audio processing equipment to keep up.
I mean... come on... 62.2? Am I reading this correctly? Who the fuck needs 62 normal speakers? I can understand two subs if you want the extra bass, but WTF--a total of 64 speakers is far beyond overkill. I never did quite see the point in 5.1 vs. 7.1... when the hell did they even get to 62.2? Either way... I am perfectly happy with a good stereo system. Two high-quality speakers and a subwoofer (or two, connected in parallel) driven by some powerful amplifiers is plenty for me. In fact, I avoid any "surround" systems, because the only things you gain... are cheaper quality components for the price leading to inferior sound, more cables (and some *long* ones at that), and problems where the sound doesn't seem like it's coming from the "right" direction.
In all of my audio courses, I was consistently reminded of one simple factor. Human beings are horrible at telling whether the sound is coming from above or below them. The way the ears work is by using a sort of radar effect, but we only have two that are theoretically exactly level and therefore cannot pinpoint vertical descripencies without necessitating the tilt of our heads, and I'm not a fan of watching a movie with my head on its side...
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
One good discount method - AMC has some "Premium" theatres (YMMV, as there may not be one near you). It's about $20 a ticket, but you get free soda and popcorn, which makes it worthwhile if you were planning to get that anyway. They also have more comfortable seating than their normal theatres, and don't allow kids in. The way to go if you're planning to go into a diabetic coma and eat fattening popcorn with lots of fake butter while you watch a movie.
14 speakers with subwoofers is all you need. 8 for corners, one center on each wall/ceiling/floor.
Don't even need subs if you use 2 or 3-way speaker cabs.
Just need the hardware and software after that.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
with a moon-rock stylus.
Orange whip? Orange whip? Three orange whips.
Not free, just cheaper.
Shut up, Flanders.
Since the post goes to a blog that contains no information here is a link to Dolby talking about it. Why would this link not be in the article? http://www.dolby.com/us/en/professional/technology/cinema/dolby-atmos.html
Get one on the way out.
I am John Hurt.
http://vimeo.com/channels/soundworkscollection/40853396
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
There's nothing wrong with the term "subwoofer". It generally refers to speakers which have a response intentionally limited to somewhere between 100 and 200Hz, which is well below the 500Hz-4kHz woofer crossover frequency you'd find in typical two and three way enclosures. Probably the best definition is "a speaker that can only reproduce frequencies of wavelengths too long for us to detect the source direction" (this is why you can put a true subwoofer almost anywhere in a room, and you only need one even for stereo).
Old woofers were huge because the enclosures were usually either simple folded baffle or sealed; the lowest wavelength that can be reproduced by such designs is proportional to the diameter of the speaker cone and either the length of the acoustic feedback path from back to front of speaker or volume of the enclosure. Thanks to the work of Neville Thiele and Richard Small in the 70s, CAD and modern manufacturing techniques it's now possible to design speakers matched to enclosures that use resonant acoustic delay lines (ports) to extend the frequency response dramatically. For these designs the speaker's excursion range, suspension stiffness and the volume of air it moves (among other factors) are more important than diameter alone*, so it's easily possible to have a 5" speaker that can reproduce down to 40Hz in a very small enclosure.
Your mention of quadraphonic reminds me of the old joke "quadraphonic is the sound system for people with four ears". I have to agree with you about surround sound in general: the sound of anything on the screen should come from where it is on the screen because our eyes follow audio cues (something to do with millions of years of wanting to avoid being eaten I suspect). But surround ambient background noises can be quite effective when used subtly (that too is natural), extreme low frequencies that are more felt than heard do add to special effects movies, and the centre speaker doesn't hurt, so 5.1 is plenty IMO. I doubt there'd be significant benefit from extra speakers in the Y dimension, since we're less sensitive to vertical displacement and the spacing of the speakers may be too narrow for more than the first few rows to really hear a difference, but it makes more sense than 62 speakers.
And I'm with you 100% on spoken vs written, though what I don't get is that since speaking is much slower than reading you'd think people with short attention spans would prefer...ooh, a shiny!
*Note to nitpickers: yes, this is vastly oversimplified.
Blank until
PC playback put aside, I don't see any chance of consumer hardware being produced to play back that many channels, which means media won't be released for this system, which means any source for this sound will probably be questionable in origin.
Well, if you try to get past the PR-speak on the video or read the few info available around:
The audio isn't actual premixed on the media.
The media contains up to 128 different audio tracks and positional information for each channel.
(Like track n78 is the noise of a helicopter, moving overhead the audience)
It's then up to the decoding hardware to mix the audio and send it to the 64 speakers so that indeed this sound seems to move as it should.
The main advantage is that the same data is usable whatever the speaker configuration so long that the decoder is able to route the sound tracks to the correct speakers. The result is just going to sound less precise when less discrete speakers are available.
So actually current PC hardware will be able to play such a movie (PC's OpenAL offers much more mixing ability than what's required - it even offers effects like doppler or reverb), only at a reduced final output precision.
And home theater can also play such media, they'll just route the audio track to a lower nomber of speakers. (Mixing audio tracks should be within the processing power of most high end HD player)
Also "Supports Dolby Atmos" is a nice check box to sell hardware, so probably player manufacturer are going to add support pretty soon.
What will increase is the number of output channels to which Atmos is mixed. First 7.1 then 9.1, 13.1 and so on.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The NHK effort called Super Hi-Vision is 8K x 4K video with 22.2 channel audio.
Nothing new under the sun. Sounds like a fun math problem though trying to phase all those speakers objectively.
62 channels is too many for my interconnect budget
So it's the cost of cabling that's the barrier to you, not the cost of 62 speakers? You need to stop wasting your money on Monster Cable, and put more of it into the speakers instead.
Only 62!?
I'm getting mighty fed up with these pathetic audio resolutions. Wake me when they reach 32spd "speakers per degree".
can be had using stereo headphones.
We only have 2 ears. 2.0 sound is enough.
he tips nothing at all
nothing at all
nothing at all
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
..Or Y, depending on your UCS orientation ;)
64 speakers and they're by and large constrained to one plane?
I do electroacosutic design for a company that does real '3D' sound installations using an equally spaced 3D array of speakers. The effect is unreal!
I mean, these guys are Dolby, so I'm sure its a 'sound' design (sorry, sorry), but I'm just curious as to why there's not a high and low ring (or at least an upper and lower L/C/R). There's crazy spatilization tricks you can do with low double-digit millisecond delay times, maybe if they're taking those sorts of approaches.
I wonder if the composer is has to address each channel, or if they're given a subset of channels and math does the rest.
I know our up/down perception isn't as keen as the other two dimensions, but still.. 64 speakers? Curious to learn more...
never drink kool-aid from a big vat
I saw the movie today and I can personally vouch for the much higher fidelity sound. The screaming kids they dubbed into the movie sound incredibly lifelike. The best part of course was the iphone ringtone cleverly hidden during an action scene, which was clearly to pay tribute to Steve Jobs. The quality was so highly detailed I could have sworn it was coming from the seat next to me.
Your head is a critical component to your sound localization..`
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I don't get the feeling that they expect people to actually install 62 speakers. I believe the idea is the solution to the problem that there are many different audio systems (stereo, surround, 5.1, 7.1, 11.1, 22.2) and currently they have to mix the audio separately for each one.
By providing 128 different tracks (with metadata giving their 3D location relative to the audience), capable of mixing down to at most 64 output channels, a theater can mix down to their exact speaker configuration. If one auditorium has overhead speakers and another doesn't, they can still play the same soundtrack through both of them, just mixed differently.
If you read the Dolby technical guidelines, you'll see they show what appears to be a 47.3 configuration. They have 5 behind the screen, 6 in back, 9 on the left, 9 top-left, 9 top-right, 9 on the right, and subwoofers front-center, left-rear, and right-rear.
dom
No for me thanks to my mono bone conduction hearing aid and being deaf since birth. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Thick and yellow sounds like a modified form of processed cheese with an unthickening agent (Canola oil maybe) to make it easier to handle. Much like one of those cheese-in-a-can products which, not being in the US, I have never had the misfortune to encounter. If I am correct, then the production process does involve cheese, in the distant ancestry of the product you sold.
That's an interesting concept that I've never considered before. I like it, a lot, for all of the same reasons you've surely already thought of...
That said, I think 5 would be good: One slightly below the geometric center of the screen (where the mouth is) would be a blessing for listeners who are well off-axis.
Too much inertia for it to ever work, though. Which is a bummer.
Kid-proof tablet..
I own and operate a movie theatre in a small town. I put real butter (that I buy from the local grocery store) on popcorn. I'm their biggest butter customer, of course, because I purchase 50 pounds at a time.
My drink prices are $1.50, $2.00 and $2.50, and my popcorn prices are $2.50, $3.50 and $4.50.
My admission prices are $8 for adults and $6 for children 12 and under, plus a $3 surcharge for 3D movies.
So there you have it. My theatre is located in a town of about 5000 people.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
People forget that the Atmos format is to get away from channel based audio. In Atmos sound (effects) are objects located in three dimensional space. After that it is 'rendered' for 2.0, 5.1, 62.2 or whatever.
You have two subs plus the 62 others.
All this caricatureing merely proves that you're all a bunch of ignorant wankers circle-jerking together.
Really.
You're just wanking over the manufactured stupidity of someone that doesn't exist, thinking this somehow proves you're clever.
OK, a few riffs on the meme is amusing, but this was done dead on this thread along ages ago.
Read up on amplifier theory. Stop parroting "Nyquist limit! Nyquist limit!" at least long enough to read up what the fucking hell it means and what it DOESN'T mean.
Read up on the difference between solid state amplifiers and class A amplification. Read up on the difference between even harmonics and odd harmonics. Read up on the difference between digital amplification and analogue amplification.
Else you're merely displaying a level of ignorance barely distinguishable from the caricatured you're "joking" about.
My tinnitus gets worse every time I go to a movie. Damn cinemas seem to think that cranking the sound up to 11 will make every movie better.
Fuck you Dolby.
Now instead of there being a 'sweet spot' to avoid (that gets pummelled with sound) I have to avoid.. the whole cinema?
Does anyone else experience this?
I saw Scott Pilgrim vs The World at the cinemas and loved it.. except that it was so loud that I felt like I was being sledgehammered. I walked out ears ringing.
As a side note, your ears ringing generally means that you have just lost some of your hearing and taken another step towards tinnitus.
...cheese-in-a-can
It did come in a large can labeled "Cheese Product" or similar so it probably did contain some kind of cheese. It was heated in an electric pot and hand ladled on the chips. After a while a leathery burnt scab formed around the sides of the pot, so you had to periodically scrape that off. Management was very cheap, so instead of throwing that away you put it on the chips and covered it with more cheese product. I imaging the customers were unhappy when they bit into a slab of cheese scab.
To this day I expect to be hunted down like a war criminal for my participation in those horrors.
That sounds great, local businesses rule. I was describing a big corporate theater chain where the people making the decisions were in a different city from the actual theater. I won't mention the name of this United company showing the work of Artists.
I'm not even sure they will be a "prosumer" market for this concept.
Let's say you went cheap and got a speaker for each channel for $100 (which would be an absolute steal.) That would still be $6200 worth of speakers. Then you have to add in wiring for 62 speakers at at least $0.25/foot, terminators at at least $5/cable for the cable ends, 62 interconnects for at least $10 each, and amplifiers. With the sheer number of amplifiers required, count on also needing a whole schiteload of standard 115V circuits to feed them power. So we're looking at around $15,000 for bargain basement Wal-Mart-is-jealous pricing.
Now scale that up to realistic pricing instead of bargain basement, and I'd be shocked if anyone could set up one of these systems for under $50,000.
The market for $50,000 audio systems is very small.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Wasn't crap 3D exciting enough to draw the crowds?
As a former live and studio sound engineer (got out while I still had some hearing left), I've always been skeptical of proposed advances in audio, both because there are very few actual advances and because those that are real are notoriously hard to push into the mainstream. The whole mega-multi speaker thing seemed like a marketing novelty to me, until I happened to see the Cirque d'Soleil Beatles show "Love" in Las Vegas, all the music for which was remastered from the original tracks. There are speakers everywhere, including six built into each seat. The experience turned me around. The show was good; the sound was unbelievably beautiful. The quality was crystal-clear (no detectable phase problems) and the spatial imaging was staggering. Here's a quote from audioholics.com:
(http://www.audioholics.com/news/editorials/musicians-corner/beatles-love-cirque-du-soleil)
And how about the "huge amount of speakers," you ask? In this case, "huge amount" means over 12,000 speakers in the theater! Yes, you read that right. Each of the 2,013 seats surrounding the stage (in a 360-degree configuration) is fitted with six speakers. Above the stage were speaker arrays similar to what you would see at an arena rock show. As we walked along the hallway that opened into and surrounded the circumference of the theater, we noticed acoustic panels on the walls seamlessly integrated with the decor. It was obvious that this room was all about sound.
There are eight sound system zones in the theater, each with dedicated Meyer M1D Stereo Line Arrays capable of functioning independently of one another. Each zone provides the listener with fully immersive 360-degree surround sound that can be precisely placed one foot in front of the listener or up to 80 feet away in most directions and moved in any direction.
So, don't be put off by a gimmicky-sounding idea like this. Done right, the results can be spectacular.
"All generalizations are false."
Apparently in New York City, this is now required.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I couldn't care less about movies and surround; like you, I don't think more than stereo with bass; 2.1 or whatnot, is necessary there.
Now, for games..... 5.1 is wonderful if you play FPS games. You want to know when something's going on behind you.
There's nothing wrong with the term "subwoofer". It generally refers to speakers which have a response intentionally limited to somewhere between 100 and 200Hz, which is well below the 500Hz-4kHz woofer crossover frequency you'd find in typical two and three way enclosures.
Then the woofers in my old (alas, stolen from me when I was burglarized) Kenwoods were really subwoofers then, because the crossover for the woofers (they were four ways, with six drivers in each enclodure) only reproduced sounds up to 300 Hz. They had a flat response from 20 Hz to 30kHz (as if anybody would hear the sounds coming from the supertweeters!)
The woofers in the JBLs I've had for 20 years are twelve inches, and I think the woofer response on them is about 50-300 Hz. So they would still be subwoofers, I guess.
I doubt there'd be significant benefit from extra speakers in the Y dimension
Probably not in a home setup, but in a movie theater it would certainly add to the experience. Some things that make sounds go up and down, not just right and left.
And I'm with you 100% on spoken vs written, though what I don't get is that since speaking is much slower than reading
For you and me, yes, but I suspect that for your typical aliterate (I've read that only 3% of people read books, it kind of shows on messageboards) reads slower than he can talk.
Free Martian Whores!
I don't know about groceries and utilities, but restaraunt and bar prices in Chicago are rediculous, but it makes sense that when real estate is expensive, everything else will be, too; the rent is a large part of a business' overhead. If I moved 50 miles south to Mount Olive, real estate would be cheaper, but that's such a small town that the grocery store, bar, etc. has no real competetion and can pretty much charge what they want.
Free Martian Whores!
There's nothing wrong with the term "subwoofer". It generally refers to speakers which have a response intentionally limited to somewhere between 100 and 200Hz, which is well below the 500Hz-4kHz woofer crossover frequency you'd find in typical two and three way enclosures. Probably the best definition is "a speaker that can only reproduce frequencies of wavelengths too long for us to detect the source direction" (this is why you can put a true subwoofer almost anywhere in a room, and you only need one even for stereo).
80Hz is the cutoff point of directionality for the majority of people. So while many cheap subwoofers are limited in flat response to 100Hz-200Hz (and slightly lower than 100Hz due to room gain) typical mid-range subwoofers are more likely to aim for 40Hz-120Hz before dropping off in frequency response, and higher-end ones 20Hz-120Hz or even lower.
Old woofers were huge because the enclosures were usually either simple folded baffle or sealed; the lowest wavelength that can be reproduced by such designs is proportional to the diameter of the speaker cone and either the length of the acoustic feedback path from back to front of speaker or volume of the enclosure. Thanks to the work of Neville Thiele and Richard Small in the 70s, CAD and modern manufacturing techniques it's now possible to design speakers matched to enclosures that use resonant acoustic delay lines (ports) to extend the frequency response dramatically. For these designs the speaker's excursion range, suspension stiffness and the volume of air it moves (among other factors) are more important than diameter alone*, so it's easily possible to have a 5" speaker that can reproduce down to 40Hz in a very small enclosure.
I'm pretty sure the wavelength is only related to the frequency of the movement, irrespective of a sealed or passive/ported design. However, SPL is related to volume of air displaced. For that, you can increase volume of displacement by increasing the diameter and/or increasing the excursion. I do think the former is a little easier to do.