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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.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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?
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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.
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.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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?
Chas - The one, the only.
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.