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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.
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 ?
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
$4 Coke?! Fill me in with your discount method!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
If you buy one and have it refilled about 12 times, then it equates to $4 a Coke.
Yet another gimmick to try to get people to return to the theaters. And again, we all say, "Just make better movies."
sig: sauer
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
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.
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.
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.
$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!
Having two subwoofer channels is a good thing - if the .2 channels are discrete (a .1 and a .1, or L/R if you will) then you can get cleaner bass. If the source material provides a .1 channel, having two subs allows you to achieve a 6dB to 10dB (depending on placement - take advantage of acoutic coupling with the walls and put the woofers a half wavelength apart and you can achieve a 10dB increase in output) increase in volume very easily. Also, bass is not totally nondirectional, so there is some audible directional cueing. Not only that, but the woofer crossover doesn't cut over at 140Hz, 90Hz, 60Hz, or whatever you set the crossover point to; it is usually an 12dB to 18dB/octave curve to eliminate harshness and so there are some higher frequencies emanating from the woofers which are definitely directional. Besides, at the very deep end, you can feel the direction of low frequencies if it hits one channel before the other, so if for example you have a woofer behind you and one in front of you, or widely spaced L/R, and a train or a herd of cattle is stampeding, the surround effect would be even greater as you feel the vibrations pan around you.
I have a high end 9.2 AV receiver with two subwoofers (260 WRMS each) and adding the second subwoofer was definitely worth it - the very bottom end was reinforced very well. If I set the subwoofer gain to unity (0dB) it is absolutely deafening. I normally listen with the subwoofers' gain set to -6dB and the subwoofer channel on the AV receiver to -11dB so I don't annoy everyone.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
When there's a sound occurring off-screen, like an explosion or helicopter, how do you intend to handle that? Just have the sound come from the exact same place as the on-screen dialog, even though that doesn't make any logical sense?
How about environmental sounds like rain, airplane cabin drone, echoes, etc?
Surround sound exists for a reason.
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.
[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
I can fill a room with a fart. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make things better than farts.
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.
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.
Then call up Creative Labs and complain that they bought up and killed off Aureal's A3D technology.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Been there, done that, no need for monstrous rack, just laptop and some Arduino-ish electronics. It's even available commercially if you don't mind the "niche tech" price premium: http://www.amazon.com/beyerdynamic-Headzone-Home-Head-Tracking/dp/B001BAJ09A/ -- it's still an inappropriate solution for watching movies with the family, though.
Shut up, Flanders.
Either your audio courses were really crappy or you misunderstood them. Sure the vertical positioning is both imprecise and uncertain relatively to the horizontal positioning, but it's there, and it works by the pinnae's vertically asymetric comb filtering and your brain's reference database of the spectrum patterns of known sounds with known positions. No head tilting/moving necessary. Not to mention that head movement reduces the uncertainty a lot. You will subconsciously make slight head movements while compensating by moving your eyeballs to keep the picture centered, and that's more than enough.
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
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
..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
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!