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An audio engineer explains why Dolby Atmos Music is “definitely going to supersede stereo”

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AdamG

AdamG

Proving your point makes it “Science”.
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maverickronin

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What’s not going to work really well is having consumers buying 25 versions of the same thing on different media so some kind of automation is needed :)

Forcing you to buy 25 copies of the same thing on different media is already the content cartels' preferred tactic and I don't see that changing any time soon.
 

Bullwinkle J Moose

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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
 
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Helicopter

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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
IDK, when you put the voices on the center channel and point at the screen, you usually are not too far off spatially.

Agree the effect is often inaccurate, like with headphones that image and layer 'well' the effect has little to do with where the sounds were when recorded.
 
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JoachimStrobel

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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

That is the reason why you need visuell cues. Hence, Mch ( and Stereo) needs a Videostream of the music played. Decoupling audio from video was a necessity caused by the early telephone and radio technology, but is superseded now by VideoConference and Videostreams. Adding visuell cues to your audio helps the brain to augment the audio signal, relying much less on the inperfectness of it. Allowing musicians to decouple their appearance from their music should become a thing of the past.
 

DonH56

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That is the reason why you need visuell cues. Hence, Mch ( and Stereo) needs a Videostream of the music played. Decoupling audio from video was a necessity caused by the early telephone and radio technology, but is superseded now by VideoConference and Videostreams. Adding visuell cues to your audio helps the brain to augment the audio signal, relying much less on the inperfectness of it. Allowing musicians to decouple their appearance from their music should become a thing of the past.

Obviously you haven't been around some of the musicians I have... Some should definitely be heard and not seen, myself included. :D

As for various multichannel derivations, it's an effect. Sometimes it works pretty well and I like it just for listening, accuracy be durned. On some recordings it works better than others IME. I do agree with the idea of mch music videos and having visual and aural references.
 

Inner Space

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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
I can, with precision. Something off with your set-up?

I was building reference 3 channel speakers for stereo recordings longer than Dolby or anyone else that I am aware of

You must be pretty old. Bell Labs demonstrated 3-channel stereo in 1933.
 

Bullwinkle J Moose

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IDK, when you put the voices on the center channel and point at the screen, you usually are not too far off spatially.

Agree the effect is often inaccurate, like with headphones that image and layer 'well' the effect has little to do with where the sounds were when recorded.

That is true

"when you put the voices on the center channel and point at the screen, you usually are not too far off spatially."

However, Dolby's first attempt at 3 channel stereo (back in the 1980's), put voices on all 3 speakers which only added to interference and distortions described in the links I provided above

It gave you a BIG sound but not very impressive and a highly distorted listening experience due to the interference patterns created

The difference between a discreet signal in each of 3 speakers and adding mono information to 2 or more speakers is NOT a subtle difference and is easily heard by even untrained listeners


I removed the crosstalk interference in my speakers while keeping the stereo ambience and spacial cue's necessary by putting a discreet signal into each speaker using standard stereo source material

If Dolby is now using discreet signals in each speaker, they are simple doing what I started first several decades ago

and they are doing it by adding more than a hundred channels of audio instead of sticking with an original stereo track

So what exactly are they Licensing anyway?
 

andymok

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So i’m told by a veteran retired Dolby consultant.

The thing about discrete channels, from the production point of view, is that things start to get really complicated when hard-baked channel adds up, like phasing or even the setup of production environment itself. The whole system soon becomes challenging to setup, to work with, and not scalable. That’s why they couldn’t push the standard further than 9.1, it just doesn’t work.

Object-based is the way out, and there isn’t just Dolby. There are film practitioner, Auro3D from Galaxy Studio and broadcaster NHK, they too see the same issues and needs. The ultimate form would be Wave Field Synthesis.

There are lots and lots of papers and researches readily available from NHK and such, explains why on earth do they need anything more than traditional surround formats, or even dolby’s format.
 
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Bullwinkle J Moose

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"That’s why they couldn’t push the standard further than 9.1"

LoL

It's not "the" standard, it's their version of "a" standard

One out of what.....A million Standards?
 

JoachimStrobel

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So i’m told by a veteran retired Dolby consultant.

The thing about discrete channels, from the production point of view, is that things start to get really complicated when hard-baked channel adds up, like phasing or even the setup of production environment itself. The whole system soon becomes challenging to setup, to work with, and not scalable. That’s why they couldn’t push the standard further than 9.1, it just doesn’t work.

Object-based is the way out, and there isn’t just Dolby. There are film practitioner, Auro3D from Galaxy Studio and broadcaster NHK, they too see the same issues and needs. The ultimate form would be Wave Field Synthesis.

There are lots and lots of papers and researches readily available from NHK and such, explains why on earth do they need anything more than traditional surround formats, or even dolby’s format.
I believe you need a lot of speakers only to recreate the correct room reverberation. It is a lot of effort for that purpose which is probably nullified by room modes.
 

tuga

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A grand piano is no exactly point source. How does Atmos handle that? Can an instrument consist of multiple points? Like putting 3 mics around and into the piano and then call this three close point sources? Same for the drums: one point source for each single percussion instrument?

You can record an instrument anechoically inside a spherical array of mics and then use a spherical speaker array to reproduce the recording.

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As instruments go, trumpet is actually quite directional across the spectrum but string instruments radiate in all directions:

KgPOHX6.png
 

tuga

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andymok

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A grand piano is no exactly point source. How does Atmos handle that? Can an instrument consist of multiple points? Like putting 3 mics around and into the piano and then call this three close point sources? Same for the drums: one point source for each single percussion instrument?

point source or not is relative to distance
 

Dimifoot

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RayDunzl

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The only time I think about something more than stereo is when I read a thread like this one.

The rest of the time, it just doesn't cross my mind.
 
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