Dolby Atmos:
The blind leading the blind
Big and impressive, but not high fidelity
When you close your eyes and an actual person is talking to you 12 feet in front and 6 feet to the left, you don't need to see them to point directly at them and guess the distance
You can't do that with a pair of JBL speakers with waveguide tweeters giving you that amazing ghost center image
You can't do that with a pair of big planar dipoles or bipoles either
and you can't do that with 128 speakers all over the room
What you get is big and impressive sound but not accuracy
can you close your eyes and point directly at the singer ?
The guitar ?
The piano ?
The whatever ?
No, the placement is muddled by the bigness and the destructive interference by the opposing speaker
https://www.sfxmachine.com/docs/FixingThePhantomCenter.pdf
https://www.britannica.com/video/214989/Wave-interference-overview-sound-waves
You are not looking for accuracy
You're looking for big and impressive
I was building reference 3 channel speakers for stereo recordings longer than Dolby or anyone else that I am aware of
I build for accuracy
I have JBL's as well, but when I close my eyes, I must wave my hand around in a circular fashion to describe the general area of an instrument or singer when listening to them
They are impressive, but not realistic sounding