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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...
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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.
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The missing link is http://www.audioholics.com/audio-technologies/5-reasons-dolby-atmos-is-doa
until the Sontarans invade.
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".
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?
If you gotta wear glasses, it's not 3D.
I have 2 speakers. It's the right setup. Center channel is clear, since they have good stereo imaging and each "object" in the front stage sounds like it comes from right where the mixer put it - you don't need more than 2 speakers when your listening positions are close together. (Well, unless it's a badly mixed movie and you can't hear voices over the noise, in which case being able to boost the center channel would actually help a lot).
As far as the rear? I bothered with rear speakers for years - what a waste. Nothing but noise there. The novelty of hearing a chopper fly over gets old fast. My living room is cluttered enough without that crap.
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Because it's another notch I the feature list that no one uses, or cares about.
That said, I have a sixty inch I just bought that doesn't have 3D.
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I'm a sound designer in Hollywood, my credits include Men in Black 3 and Zero Dark Thirty.
The main promise of ATMOS was that it wouldn't matter how many speakers you had -- a mixer could prepare a final mix in Atmos in his 60-horn room, but then when the bitstream on the DCP or Blu-Ray was decoded in the theater or home, it wouldn't matter if the end-user had a 60-speaker Atmos rig, a 9.1, a Barco Auro speaker system, a 5.1, a stereo or even a mono. The Dolby renderering algos would simply take the panned objects and automatically render the correct audio stream for each speaker, as a function of the speaker's position relative to the listener. The Dolby RMU is just a glorified OpenAL audio engine, it gets fed audio streams that have an alt/azimuth data envelope, and this envelope is transformed down to whatever speaker array the end user has.
What's even more interesting is you could have a significantly more complex speaker array than the person who mixed it -- maybe he mixed it with 32 speakers, and you have some future-ready system with 100 -- and the renderer will still do the Right Thing and expand the spatial resolution accordingly. Atmos mixes are future-proof for any simple, non-phase-related speaker array.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
We have two ears, but you might notice that the ears have fairly complicated geometry. Why would that be? Well, it turns out that the various parts of the ear bounce sound, and sound coming from different directions, both azimuth and elevation, bounces differently. Your brain is very good at figuring this out. This wikipedia page on Sound Localization is quite informative.
It turns out that humans have among the best direction-sensing hearing of any animal.
[disclaimer -- I work for Dolby, but in their imaging group]
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What could be done by reversing this process from the stream? There's a nifty trick on surround sound - some sounds you'll find the center channel is used for lyrics and the sides for instrumentals in songs, making it trivial to isolate them and get clean audio for redubbing with. If it works as you describe, would that make it easy to pull out individual instruments or effects? That could be useful for hobbyist remixers.
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The way Atmos works is it can carry up to 128 individual audio channels. 20 of these are set aside for two discrete 9.1 mixes (mixers choice what goes in those), the remaining 108 are set aside for individual pannable objects. In the file themselves, these audio objects are full-rez and lossless; however, these objects don't "live" all the time, the mixer can use them for a few seconds here and there. Nothing as general as "all the dialogue" or "all the car sound effects" lives in the pannable objects throughout the entire project.
There are discrete sounds in the Atmos bitstream itself though, and in principle it would make remixing easier, so I suspect you'll never see an Atmos bitstream in a consumer format without DRM.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
What I'd like to hear is an orchestra recording which mics each instrument and gives each of them a channel. It'd be interesting to see how well Atmos can recreate the sound stage of a full orchestra.
If it can't do that properly, then it's a useless fad, because that's just presenting a "static" sound image, not a moving one. I have a strong suspicion it relies on moving sounds to mask the fact that it's not very accurate about positioning them.
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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.
Paul,
When has DRM seriously hindered anyone (but legitimate consumers) from accessing desired content?
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THANK GOD!!!
This is why I suspect Dolby Atmos will never be put on a consumer format.
"Paul" is my boss.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Before he died, Frank Zappa was exploring this very idea. His performances with the Ensemble Modern where usually mic'ed with one mic per instrument, then he'd have a surround sound desk where all the instruments could be panned around the room and so he'd incorporate motion into his compositions. Apparently he either did or was going to (death has an unfortunate way of interfering with ambitions) do this in a live setting so the audience could hear the instruments "flying" around over their heads. It would have been pretty spectacular, even if most people where mystified by his avant garde serialist classical music.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Then why do all the TVs over 50 inches include it?
Included =/= being used. My TV is 3D capable, yet I never use that feature, because I consider it to be a gimmick. If there had been a cheaper version of my TV without 3D capability, I would have bought that one (same for all the "smart TV" Internet features, btw - all I want is a huge display with a couple HDMI inputs...). Sadly, that option did not exist. My totally unscientific research among friends/relatives shows that if they have a 3D TV, at most it has been used for one or two 3D movies like Ice Age "for the kids" to try it out, and that's it.
The useful gadget to sell would be something cheap (under $50) that has a small array of microphones and listens to a predefined set of tones, then produces calibration data telling your audio source what it needs to do to compensate for the poor acoustics and speaker placement in the owner's living room.
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This really isn't how we do music recording. I had the opportunity to work with John Eargle before he passed on, he had a bunch of Grammys and had done hundreds of classical and jazz albums, and his standard rig for live-house music recording was an 8-track recorder, with maybe 2 of those tracks set aside for spot mics -- the rest were a Decca tree or other stereo array, plus room mics. We use more spot mics for film music recording, but we do that specifically so we can reposition and alter the relationship between the soloist and ensemble, not to preserve it.
Also, nobody uses the pannable objects for music, it's just not done. The composer's scoring engineer makes a 7.1 or 9.1 and this is what you end up hearing.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
There is a film wavefront synthesis system: IOSONO. There were a few screens at the Mann Chinese here in LA wired for it, it sounds amazing and you get real 3D depth through the screen, but it never really caught on for business reasons. These mixes didn't use live recording either, they were multitrack, but IOSONO had a panner algorithm that could position a sound source in depth by artificially synthesizing a wavefront for it.
Dolby isn't interested in this because the theaters aren't. Dolby didn't really want to make Atmos: AMC came to them and asked them to develop a sound system that would justify a $20 ticket in AMC's premium rooms. The Atmos speaker array is the "Fuck It, We're Going to Five Blades" approach, and the theater owners make sure that all the speaker emplacements are clearly visible to the audience, so they know that they're paying for all those speakers, and Moar is Better.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.