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Is Dolby Atmos a Flop For Home Theater Like 3DTV Was?
An anonymous reader writes: Object-based audio is supposed to be the future of surround sound. The ability to pan sound around the room in 3D space as opposed to fixed channel assignments of yesterday's decoders. While this makes a lot of sense at the cinema, it's less likely consumers rush to mount speakers on their ceilings or put little speaker modules on top of their existing ones to bounce sound around the room. Leading experts think this will be just a fad like 3DTV was. What do you think?
I think: "File Not Found".
Bad linky...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
and yes, you dont have enough speakers and amps for atmos at home. sound bars wont make it. hell, most people i know have their 5.1 systems setup wrong.
The return of silent films is coming, mark my words.
Then why do all the TVs over 50 inches include it?
A more rational pannable surround could be implemented with just four speakers using Ambisonics. It isn't patentable and doesn't sell lots of speakers so it will continue to be ignored.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
The missing link is http://www.audioholics.com/audio-technologies/5-reasons-dolby-atmos-is-doa
what i think? static placement is so AARP.
until the Sontarans invade.
I have two ears. I prefer 2 speakers.
I click the link and get sent back to the /. article so I click the link again and back again to /. ... help!!! How do I make it stop?????
That would imply that it was popular at some point.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
I love good sound, i would be willing to drop 5x or more on sound what a TV costs, but i don't, ya know why? cause I now have the cash but don't see any high end content. I am locked to Comcast which means shit audio streams even on HBO and other high end channels, netflix is better but not much. For music, a 40 year old tech, CD, is still king because all of the streaming and download services, like my choice, Google Music, all are over compressed and bitstarved.
Blue Ray, DVD-A, SA-CD and any other truly good sounding form of content delivery seem to be flopping because they are tied to physical media.We need high end streaming and downloadable content but this will never happen as long as people can be tricked into thinking Beats and other poorly configured experiances are somehow "good".
One in each corner of a room, floor and ceiling. Two quadrophonic amps with a computer software program to 'fade' between below and above audio and you're set.
I had conceived of this over 12 years ago.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
... but I never felt the need to invest in even a 5.1 surround system. I find my old stereo speakers and amp at 100 watts RMS per channel is more than enough for my needs. Hearing bullets fly past my head doesn't really affect my enjoyment of any movie. So I can't see myself shelling out for this either anytime soon.
Stuff like this and 3D only works in big rooms
and by big is cinema sized rooms
In order to be a fad, there has to be some significant adoption ("pet rocks", for example). Not gonna happen, IMO, with Dolby Atmos (tm). I've got a fairly extensive last gen' home setup (1080p, not 4K; 7.1, not 9.3), and there's nothing I've seen or heard that encourages me to "upgrade" to even those levels, much less the whole room redesign needed for Atmos. I'm sure there will some adoption by those who simply "must" own the latest tech, then watch cable/satellite 720p, but it won't be enough to constitute a fad.
It's not even a fad - it's dead on arrival. Most people don't even use 5.1 speakers. Hell, most don't even use 2.1. Anything that requires that much dedication of the room to audio is not going to sell to the mass market. Period.
3D TV at least had a vague hope of succeeding in the mass market. If they can ditch the glasses, they might actually succeed. But people are lazy and don't want to put any effort into their mindless entertainment. Putting glasses on to watch a movie was too much for them. Do you really think setting up a shitload of speakers all around the room is going to pass?
When I built my house, we had a large living room - 20x30 feet. Not grand because it's function was mostly solar. I installed four speakers in the ceiling. They were arranged L/R/L/R going around the room. This was quite sufficient to fool you into thinking it was surround and things moved from right to left. In short, quite unnecessary technical clutter proposed here.
I haven't seen anyone comment on what I think could be the best thing about Atmos: getting the best of whatever surround sound setup you have. Because all the sounds are objects in 3D space, if your receiver knows where in the room your speakers are located, it could make the best use of wherever your speakers are located to recreate the spatial sense of each sound. Most people who get a home theater in a box and don't have it set up in the optimal configuration. I mean, I've got a system that's a bit better than the box systems, but because I'm not willing to get rid of the bookshelves in my den, I can't get the rear channels mounted quite equidistant from my seating. I think a lot of people are in similar situations. I mean, how many people do you know who have a dedicated theater room with all the speakers in the perfect positions?
I know that most receivers now do have positional information, but the standard 5.1 and 7.1 mixes are hard encoded per channel. And while some receivers do processing on the streams to approximate what I'm talking about, the Atmos system of giving each sound it's own position in space and letting the system figure out how to best play that back in a room would be a better experience. I think Atmos should really be diving straight to the bottom. Get it into those home theater in a box systems that people buy at big box stores and promise them that however they set up their speakers, it'll make the best use of them.
As speaker setup this might be to complicated and a waste of effort, however motion tracked virtual reality headsets are right around the corner and with them you can do some really fancy binaural 3D sound rendering on the cheap. So I would assume that the success of this depends in large part on if they will let people write support for it for the virtual-cinema players that already exist or if they shoot it dead with patents.
Although we feel like we can hear in 3D, the reality is that we only have two ears. Our brain makes the 3D part by incorporating our vision and by head movement to try to figure out where something is louder/softer and subtle pitch changes. Dolby knows that. To get the 3D like effect you pretty much need to tune the seat. There are tools out there, but unless you are going super high end home theater, it's a waste of time.
1080 HD and 5.1 audio are more than adequate for immersive viewing experiences. Most don't need or want more and even if they did they're certainly now willing to pay for it.
Also, doesn't 5.1 or 7.1 accomplish 95% of what "object-based audio" promises? How many people actually want to "pan around the audio room"? The main use for that which I could see would be in virtual reality setups. Which has been disappointing consumers since approximately 1998.
Even the Oculus Rift, which nerds have been drooling over for a while now. When you get right down to it you are strapping a device to your face that looks like Scuba goggles. It's not very fashionable or inclusive. And I'm not aware of any decent content libraries that make the device compelling. Maybe in time those problems can be overcome but it's going to take a lot more work.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No - it's not the speaker count - it's about finally breaking away from the speaker count.
If you have only a stereo system - no problem. Maybe you only have 5.1 - no problem. Want to upgrade to 7.2.4 or beyond - no problem. When done correctly there's only one Dolby Atmos soundtrack that the studio needs to master - every stub (sound channel) in there has an ideal tracking position stream, and the final mix happens at playback for exactly the hardware you happen to be listening to.
The problem this fixes is that up tell now almost every movie and some music was mixed for stereo and 5.1 only. Find anything made for 7.1 or higher - they are super rare as each new format that tried (and dozens have) to come along died before it became popular. The entire sound industry is stuck with stereo and 5.1 because no one wants to create a mix for short lived one-off systems. Dolby Atmos future-proofs the sound format so truly high resolution spatial audio can finally happen. Studios save money because they only need to mix for one format. Theaters like it because it really sounds better with overhead and high resolution surrounds. Audiences like it because all the individual sounds (like dialog) sound much clearer without being crammed together like before with 5.1. Also - did I mention dialog being much easier to understand even with the same sound levels (read up on the cocktail effect)?
Nearly every blockbuster movie for the last two years has been made with Dolby Atmos.
Don't take my word for it (or the article) - please try it yourself. The next big movie that comes out - go see it twice. Once in flat surround, once in Dolby Atmos. If you can hear the difference you will probably want this at home - even without going nuts with lots of speakers.
My biggest pet peeve - many if not most 5.1 mixes in the wild are terrible. There's no consistency as to what the ".1" happens to be, and the center channel is often ignored or worse. The Dolby Atmos format helps fix this - we handle the bass management at playback so it's correct for your system, and all position information lives in metadata rather than the mix so it's also as correct as possible for your system. I can hardly wait for "The Dark Side of the Moon" to come out in this format!
Full disclosure: I work at Dolby. You ain't heard nothing yet folks.
Forget movies - think games!
If you can hear exactly where someone is trying to sneak up behind you (or above you) - you've got a huge advantage.
Anything over 2.1 makes music sound Terrible. So I don't bother. Go 2.1, and spend the money making sure those 2 speakers and the sub are of quality, screw the surround.
From the fine article - "The fact is that our ears are not properly placed to locate higher sounds very well."
That may be true for you - but most of us animals have evolved to track the birds (or snakes) above us, and the snap of twigs and rustle of leaves below us. It might not be fully understood how this all works, but it does.
Here you go - put on some headphones and have a virtual haircut...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA
Cinavia killed any future sound innovation.
Whats the point of dolby n-teen when you can HEAR the fucking DRM squeaking and reverbing in the background?
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I'd say that we won't know the answer for a while more, provided Dolby don't ditch the tech before that. Firstly, humans are generally much more visual than auditive: a brand new TV set with vivid colors, large contrast and a sharp image will be a much easier and more obvious sell/upgrade than a new sound set. Not only are we better wired to notice the difference, it's also much more easily demonstrated in a shop, whereas a sound system normally needs a closed room with not too horrible sound properties to work well. On top of that, you can buy speakers individually, or in a pack with the receiver. Finally, lest we forget, most people will have one "home theater"-style room, be it the living room or a dedicated room just for movie watching. While they might buy a new TV for another room in the house, just about nobody will buy a second sound system.
The end result is that people upgrade their sound system at a much slower pace than the rest of their home theater setups. For instance, we've had the same speaker setup for something like 15 years. The speakers themselves don't really age (they'll eventually degrade, but that's about it - there isn't as pronounced a difference in tech as with TVs where you could get 2x better sound for the same price within a few years), so there's no point in changing them, and therefore we don't really think about changing the receiver itself. It's old enough that it doesn't have HDMI. It doesn't support Dolby True HD or DTS HD. Atmos is pretty much the equivalent of OLED TVs to us - it sounds neat, but not enough to be worth the investment.
I have 5.1 and never upgraded to 7.1 or 7.2 ( even dumber), and adding more speakers is simply not worth the bother. No thank, not for me.
I've heard Dolby's positional audio, being driven from a game, in the Dolby Labs screening room in San Francisco. It sounds great. You can hear people sneaking up behind you in the game. You can hear someone walking around you. There's a real sense of presence.
That's in a room built, at a cost of millions, as a demo for Dolby's audio technology. The room is on a separate foundation from the rest of the building, with an inner set of vibration isolated walls. The room acoustics are very good; you don't need a microphone when giving a talk there. The walls and ceiling conceal speakers everywhere, and the room with the amps and processors looks like a small server farm.
You're not going to get that in Joe Sixpack's living room. You might get close to it in some high end home theater installations, the ones that look like small movie theaters and are used for no other purpose. It's a niche market.
As with every other new Dolby system, it always started in the $800+ range, wait a few years and its now in the most basic of receivers. It sounds nice if someone wanted to go to that extent, but hey if its there already I wont complain :)
I love my 3DTV...
let's be realistic - nobody uses 7.2, heck, or even 5.1. It's just an annoying gimmick and doesn't really help the atmosphere at all.
My next living room speaker system will consist of just 2 Bowers and Wilkins 683 floorstanders. I don't think I will need a sub at all.
Seems people are more interested in the tech than the actual content. If I'm listeing to speech my attention is on what the speaker is saying, not where in the room they appear to be. If it's music, I'm more interested in hearing all the instruments and the dynamics than any positioning that I wouldn't know about anyway.
If you have visual cues then this positioning information will be more effective than playing with sound phase relationships etc. If you don't have such cues then does it matter at all?
Most TV's out there are 3D now and most new content is 3D. 3D showings at the theater are generally packed.
I appreciate it, you fall into one of the three groups who don't like 3D. People with glasses, People who are super sensitive and get headaches even with the new great refresh rates, or People who formed an opinion without having seen modern 3D. For the rest of us, we are oddballs who fall into the "life is in 3D therefore a quality 3D picture is more realistic."
They did seriously overrate 3D in the pitch to sell it. Close one eye, open it back up, is there a difference in depth perception? Yes. But that difference is all 3D is and all it should be. Ideally they don't do anything different because they are filming 3D. No gimmicks or throwing things at you. You should forget you are watching 3D and just walk away feeling like the movie was especially exciting and immersive.
I find it unsurprising that Atmos will fall on its ass in home cinema. Who is going to plaster their walls and ceilings with speakers?
As someone who watches ASMR videos, the ability to control the direction where the viewer experiences sounds coming from is a really great thing, and if it's used properly it could be really beneficial to the entertainment experience.
DOA for sure but will wind up in some US Standard thus requiring Broadcasters/Cable to deliver it and who will use it in anything but 2.0 mode? The same percentage of TV viewers listening to 5.1 while watching a prime time Network TV show on any given night. Which is how many? Anyone like to venture a guess? 1, 5, 10, 30%?
I'll be nice and say 5% AtMos(T)!!!!
Already commented so not able to mod - someone else with mod points out there? You've hit the nail on the head - atmos (or equivalent systems) with positional info distinct from the speaker channels should definitely get the best out of whatever installation
of course, there'll be the guys on here that point out that nothing will ever sound as good as their perfectly set up reference system, but they'll also be the ones complaining about 'the masses' having really badly set up rooms.
maybe that's it? a little bit of a frightner that time and effort may soon be nearly caught up with digital trickery?
...so who is going to pay for this extra feature vs. what we've got today? Are people even going to care if they hear in three dimensions versus on a single plane? Most people aren't because most people don't care about surround sound in the home, and most people can't tell the difference between even 5.1 and 7.1.
There's a growing movement to measure the bass content in movies via bass waterfall graphs and bass content peak versus average graphs. These graphs are done by analyzing the waveforms of movie content with a radio astronomy tool known as Spectrum Lab. Pretty cool project:
http://data-bass.ipbhost.com/index.php?/topic/12-the-low-frequency-content-thread-films-games-music-etc/
I think ATMOS was revealed to be a Sontaran plot to turn earth into a cloning center. No wonder it will never become popular.
I love 3DTV....
The problem is content....often you can find a blu-ray of a movie on sale for $12.99, but then they want $35 for the 3D version. 3D should be priced at $5 more than the regular versions. And get the same sales. That would do wonders.
Passive 3D is great....lightweight....tons of fun.
I think 64 discrete channels that Atmos provide will never pan into the Home Theater. It's a fantastic sound format as long as the space can reproduce the presented audio. In that way, it will always be a reason for me to go see a film in the Theater knowing that I cannot replicate at my house.
Ultimately, it depends on how it -sounds-, and how easy/spendy it'll be to make it work in my house.
I have a nice audio system now. I'm quite happy with it. I could see a modest investment in new gear of some sort, but only if it sounds substantially better. I'm a musician, used to sitting with other musicians, so maybe I'd like it if my listening room could sound like I'm/we're sitting among the band.
I think. It works when I'm playing, but sittin' back and listening? Remains to be heard. I'd have to hear it before I had enough facts to have a real opinion. As long as it's not very spendy, maybe. If it sounds enough mo' betta, maybe. I'll wait, keep it in mind, watch the tech evolve, and if "takes off" and evolves to 2.0. I wouldn't be an early adopter.
Overall, sure, it just might be a neat thing, but how much better could it really sound? My system, my room, my ears are happy as things are now, so time'll tell, eh?