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Microsoft Xbox One and Windows 10 Getting Dolby Atmos Surround Sound (betanews.com)
BrianFagioli quotes a report from BetaNews: When people think of the technology behind video games and movies, they often just focus on the visuals. True, when creating an immersive experience, the video is probably the most important aspect from a technological perspective. With that said, audio quality is very important too. Today, Microsoft announces that both Xbox One And Windows 10 will be getting Dolby Atmos support in future updates. If you aren't familiar, it is a surround sound technology with a focus on immersion. Don't have compatible audio hardware? Don't worry -- the Windows-maker is promising a "virtual" Atmos experience too. Larry Hryb, Xbox Live's Major Nelson said in a statement, "Xbox will be the first game console to feature Dolby Atmos and game developers are excited about using the new capabilities to make their games richer and more engaging. Atmos support for the Blu-ray app on Xbox is already available in Preview and will be released to GA soon -- and we're very excited now to offer Atmos support to games on Xbox One and Windows 10."
Is this just some advertising for Dolby? They're a nightmare to deal with from a licensing and certification perspective. Give your money and time to DTS and Fraunhofer and stop supporting this monster.
If you aren't familiar, it is a surround sound technology with a focus on immersion. Don't have compatible audio hardware? Don't worry -- the Windows-maker is promising a "virtual" Atmos experience too.
Atmos adds more surround channels. Typically this is 1 or 2 surround channels directly above you.
No one sane has a setup that can support this. Even in the theaters it's pointless. It adds nothing (and I say this as someone who has a 7.1 setup instead of your typical 5.1).
Al the virtual shit Dolby puts out is awful, as well.
Don't give them money for this shit. Atmos is a (shitty) solution in search of a problem. When most people think a soundbar provides great audio, you know they're trembling in their boots. 99% of people will be well-served by a 5.1 HTiB for a few hundred bucks. Enthusiasts will go for more expensive receivers and amps (and the redundant preamp), and maybe to 7.1. Only morons go for anything beyond that, especially as there is no fucking content for it (and what little there is is gimmicky shit).
We're getting a lot of marketing press releases dressed up as Slashdot posts. Most of these is stuff no one gives a shit about. Microsoft in particular has every little fart they have broadcast on Slashdot.
How about some real news, Slashdot? What about stuff we can't read in the "media releases" section of corporate web sites?
Who the hell needs this? I'm not drilling any more holes in my fucking ceiling
I fail to see why game-devs would be excited about this. There is already DirectSound 3D, which can produce surround-sound and it doesn't require any sort of specific, specialized and expensive hardware, like Atmos does. How many people have 5.1 surround-setups, and how many can be expected to have an Atmos-compatible setup? I'd wager the latter group is a very miniscule number when compared to basic 5.1 setups, so where's the value-proposition for devs to spend time and money on Atmos-compatibility in their games?
You thought you haven't had enough Windows Updates? Fear no more. Introducing Windows 10 to the Dolby Atmos family.
Instead of sitting around in your living room doing Absolutely Nothing for 2 hrs waiting for Windows Update to finish, NOW you will get the privilege to sit around a 60 feet wide movie theater screen doing Absolutely Nothing for 2 hrs waiting for Windows Update to finish.
Coming Soon in every Dolby Atmos movie theaters everywhere!
I'm not even a gamer but I've seen a dozen or so gamers setups and it seems so last century that Microsoft thinks it's time to spend effort on the sound quality.
What about DTS-X?
Nothing good can come from naming a product "ATMOS".
Do you want Sontarans? Because that's how you get Sontarans.
Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of.
There is little doubt that modern technology can achieve incredible results and we can reproduce sounds and images almost better than the original; but why go to such lengths, when there is so little content that is worth reproducing to any high standard? I remember back in the 70es, there was a similar craze for the most crystal clear sound and so on - and a few people would have a special listening room, with one chair in the optimal position etc etc, and maybe for that rare breed it was worth it all. But for everybody else, what is the relevance? Who has the time, even, to sit and concentrate on the sublime?
It's like the nonsense about food - sorry, 'cuisine' - and foodies; they'll go on about the most exquisite ingredients, the most luxurious this and that, but when you get down to it, it's just grub that you're going to wrap your face around, and while most people can tell the difference between cheap crap and good quality food, very few can tell whether it is the very bestest in the world or merely good.
OK, rant's over, you can breathe again.
Atmos is not a codec. Atmos is an object-based authoring workflow for media where, instead of discretely-mixed channels, you have audio objects with positional information. It is the job of the decoder (Dolby Digital Plus, or E-AC-3, Dolby True HD, or Meridian Lossless Packing with metadata, and AC-4, a new format extending some of the tools of HE AAC v1 and v2 with some new goodies) to decode these objects with the correct loudness and compression characteristics per the metadata that accompanies them. A renderer that understand the actual speaker configuration present in the listening environment, rather than the CEA-861 standard baseline configurations for typical surround, then mixes these objects.
In Dolby Digital Plus, which is the most common way to do this today, these objects are stored as a different substream type that goes along with the channelized audio, so the audio renderer in an Atmos-enabled Dolby Digital Plus has the job of dealing with and mixing into the speakers - typically, this means a 5.1 + 4 or 7.1 + 4 configuration, where the +4 implies four ceiling-mounted speakers. In AC-4, it is possible to have an entirely object-based render with no channel information so that the renderer bears the entire burden of channelizing, whereas in Dolby Digital Plus it is normally accompanied by a fixed channelized mix of anything from mono center only to 7.1.
Here is where the Dolby narrative breaks down: it is wholly impractical to have ceiling speakers for the vast majority of installations. About 30% of homes have surround of any kind, and less than a sixth of those have 7.1. Even ceiling-fired speakers that Dolby touts are very limited in their efficacy. The most shocking thing of all here is that upmixed content (i.e. content that uses an interpretation of a channelized mix to fill ceiling speakers) sounds better to most listeners because it is inherently louder than the native mix! People want to hear more coming out of their surround and ceiling speakers even though the guys in Hollywood mixing their movies have a more nuanced approach to this, so they're better off with an A/V receiver that supports upmixing with ceiling speakers and sending a non-Atmos mix to the A/V receiver.
Even if you virtualize surround to headphones - a thing that has been done since the Aureal 3D days back in the '90s and very cheap technology fundamentally as Realtek and the rest of the cheap guys have shown - it is still of limited value to have an Atmos mix because you can still upmix and virtualize the content in the same way, and most people can't A/B test this. And, of course, any game or native PC content that has linear PCM out can be channelized and output to HDMI without touching an Atmos encoder or decoder.
Dolby has some big challenges ahead of it. Its patents on AC-3, its bread and butter, run out next year. While E-AC-3 has taken up some of that slack, it is not the entirety of it. Audio coding efficiency is no longer a problem as of HE AAC v2 for stereo and HE AAC v1 for multichannel, which is why AC-4 was really just an add-on to these. Many countries, such as Korea, are adopting the competing MPEG-H standard because Dolby has stuck it to their largest conglomerates for so many years in terms of the licensing money they have paid. Their other technologies such as Dolby Vision and Contrast are being put to the wayside in favor of HDR10 and other standards. All the parlor tricks and announcements about Atmos are not worth the time and effort for most of us, especially in the PC world, when there are very good alternatives. All this because the companies that Dolby sells to are fundamentally ignorant about audio technology.
In short, this is much ado about almost nothing.
Interesting. I guess the whole point of this is that Windows/xbox has Dolby Foo Bar Baz(R), and PS/Linux/ doesn't. Boosts sales a bit, whether it makes sense or not. My Wintendo, back in the 90's, had EAX, which actually was cool.
I have dealt with high end home theaters and the "atmos" hype is all hype. all they are doing is mixing audio into the other channels at phase differences. Almost NO movies are sending the full 16 channel audio as nobody wants to pay the sound guy to do more than a 5.1 mix. it's rare as hell to even find something with a full 7.1 audio mix in it.
Also you have to have an acoustically controlled room, 99% of you dont have sound treated walls and ceiling in a room that get's larger to the rear on a taper.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's the per-object positional metadata that's the interesting part in Atmos. With up to 128 individually placed sound sources (and a few ambient channels) in the bitstream, sounds can be rendered on-the-fly through whatever speakers are nearest to the source position.
While much has been made about new ceiling channels, those are entirely optional. The whole point of the Atmos stream is that it can be rendered with best-available accuracy on *any* speaker setup, from a 12+6 cinema arrangement to 7.2 home cinemas, 2.1 soundbars, or a pair of headphones. By preserving the structure in the bitstream, it can be downmixed accurately to any number of speakers in any positional arrangement, so long as the renderering decoder knows where each speaker is.
Games (on consoles and PCs) are a perfect match for this, because they already deal with sound-emitting objects with known positions. With API support (which DirectX already provides), those object sounds can be passed with minimal downmixing to an external Atmos decoder that knows exactly which speakers to route them to. And while you're right that (theoretically) the game machine could do the renderering itself direct to the output PCM channels (as it does now), the number of available channels may not match the number of speakers, and it would still need to be told exactly where each channel's speaker is positioned to get the full locational benefits - something that's already done during a good Atmos setup.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?