Dolby Atmos Critique Video

[Curvature]

Nothing remains the same. Time moves on. Look at TV. Can’t get component video. Only hdmi. Shifting standards. Just the way things are. b

You're missing the point.

Dolby and others are creating an artificially difficult situation. They could have contributed to an open format and pushed its adoption.

But, profits.

 

[Zensō]

You're missing the point.

Dolby and others are creating an artificially difficult situation. They could have contributed to an open format and pushed its adoption.

But, profits.

Yup, Dolby is all about monopolizing any market in which they’re competing.

Dolby to Restrict Non-Native Upmixing on Atmos Based Products

Dolby recently issued a mandate to ALL of their Atmos licensee partners to restrict usage of 3rd party upmixers with ANY Dolby signals. What impacts will this have on your system? Read on to find out.

www.audioholics.com

Dolby Laboratories Stock: Leadership In A Monopolistic Environment (NYSE:DLB)

Dolby generates revenue by licensing its technologies. Read why we believe DLB stock is undervalued by the market.

seekingalpha.com

 

[JoeWhip]

You're missing the point.

Dolby and others are creating an artificially difficult situation. They could have contributed to an open format and pushed its adoption.

But, profits.

And this is different than what occurs in many industries where the big boys exercise their muscle and influence? Not saying it is good at all but how the world works, at least in a capitalist world.

 

[JoeWhip]

Btw, I would read anything you see in seekingalpha with a grain of salt. There I am speaking from experience.

 

[Zensō]

And this is different than what occurs in many industries where the big boys exercise their muscle and influence? Not saying it is good at all but how the world works, at least in a capitalist world.

That doesn’t mean we have to like and accept it, especially when this muscle flexing intrudes on an activity that is near and dear.

 

[Zensō]

Btw, I would read anything you see in seekingalpha with a grain of salt. There I am speaking from experience.

Oh, I won’t be going there for financial advice, no worries.

 

[JoeWhip]

Didn’t say you had to like it, there are plenty of stuff I am not happy about too.

 

[Curvature]

And this is different than what occurs in many industries where the big boys exercise their muscle and influence? Not saying it is good at all but how the world works, at least in a capitalist world.

I think the lesson to take from this situation is that artists and listeners struggle the most in it. Though you know very well how hard it is to set up a good hom system, you are probably not aware how difficult it is to make technical decisions about music, which extend far past gear into all of its functional capabilities and limitations. And even then no guarantee that what you're putting together in the studio will translate.

Translation is basic problem that concerns speaker and room design that shoots through questions of preference and deeper technicalities of acoustics and so on. We discuss it here all the time.

If you like art history, you'll probably know that certain paintings are not meant to be faced directly. The correct aspect is often referenced to a particular angle. Only then do the figures and landscape and their relationships come through. What happens when this contextual information is lost is the work is suddenly distorted. If you look in the history of vinyl there were plenty of EQ schemes beyond RIAA, which makes playback difficult for old music. With Atmos, you don't even need a long passage of time to see this effect. You have it immediately in the broken translation between channel count and playback between rooms, in the colorations and distortions, more severe than stereo, if you sit outside the sweet spot, in the complexity of EQing all of those channels, the inconsistency of up/downmixing and binaural rendering. This is outside the expense involved as well.

Sure, progress. Of a kind. With none of the obvious problems fixed and old ones returning more strongly than before.

 

[Curvature]

Yup, Dolby is all about monopolizing any market in which they’re competing.

Dolby to Restrict Non-Native Upmixing on Atmos Based Products

Dolby recently issued a mandate to ALL of their Atmos licensee partners to restrict usage of 3rd party upmixers with ANY Dolby signals. What impacts will this have on your system? Read on to find out.

www.audioholics.com

Dolby Laboratories Stock: Leadership In A Monopolistic Environment (NYSE:DLB)

Dolby generates revenue by licensing its technologies. Read why we believe DLB stock is undervalued by the market.

seekingalpha.com

Right. We've seen this in Dolby operating history going back 50 years.

 

[FriedChicken]

You're missing the point.

Dolby and others are creating an artificially difficult situation. They could have contributed to an open format and pushed its adoption.

But, profits.

Dolby is a for-profit enterprise in a capitalistic market, and is seemingly trying to create a winner-takes-all environment (or maybe that existed already?), similar to intel/amd in the CPU space.

This is Dolby's prerogative and to fault them for that demonstrates a naïvety about how the free market works.

That said, the impetus falls on both the journalists to inform the consumer, and on the consumer, to make the correct decision. We've already seen the broader tech industry effectively neuter and swindle the tech journalists. For crying out loud google (aLPhaBeT) owns youtube and can (and does) happily suppress real critique or competition. Apple scalped Anand of Anandtech from the public, IMO to silence his journalism about computers that remains unsurpassed in the computing space.

So this is where our "purpose" or "role stands. Dolby is seemingly trying to do what the other tech giants have already successfully achieved. It is imperative we have the right discussions on this, and that the relevant journalists, including amir, do the due diligence to inform the consumer of what's going on and call out nasty practices when we see them.

I have seen an extraordinary fear among journalists to levy real criticism or poignantly report on practices in the broader space. Gene at Audioholics is actually very good IMO, but even he falls flat when confronted with something he should know to criticize, as it breaks this positive and optimistic vibe. Measurements are great for keeping hardware manufacturers honest, but we need something like that in the software/decoder/industry space.

I'm serious. Tech journalism has become such a joke, with big tech effective obfuscating and manipulating the consumer and the journalists, they liberate themselves from the consumer's interests, and create a carte-blanche for themselves to run amok and take over an industry (again, this is their prerogative). There's a reason Apple and others love MKBHD; he's a complete and total moron who parrots exactly what the tech company's marketing agencies want said.

This is one of those rare youtube videos where I see someone really point out the crap that's being said. Coincidentally (or not) he also actually swears in his videos. I'm pretty sure he's demonetized and suppressed by youtube.

 

[Zensō]

This is Dolby's prerogative and to fault them for that demonstrates a naïvety about how the free market works.

It is absolutely possible to fault them without being naive about how the market works. Just because something is legal and commonplace doesn't make it above being called out and criticized. In fact, as creators and consumers it more than ever falls on us because, as you stated, for the most part tech journalists are no longer doing their jobs.

 

[Curvature]

This is Dolby's prerogative and to fault them for that demonstrates a naïvety about how the free market works.

It's not a "free market". In formal economics, that definition only applies to the lowest tier of agents who have limited influence and compete primarily with each other. Dolby is very much a titan with heavy influence over curves (price, supply, etc.). It's an oligopoly.

I understand very well that knowledge these days is more privatized than not and open source formats are marginalized from the start. We are in a position to compromise where we must, and resist elsewhere.

Imagine if REW wasn't freeware. Pro speaker companies have already contributed to producing the open source EASE paradigm and offer that data openly. The history of various codecs shows the open source formats to prevail, although maybe that won't be the case anymore given how dominant streaming is. I'm fairly sure that Atmos will be pushed to the side at some point in favour of a better solution, and that solution will be open source. However, they will take as much money as they can out of the market in the short term until that time because of the effect of this campaign.

Measurements are great for keeping hardware manufacturers honest, but we need something like that in the software/decoder/industry space.

I agree and have said this before.

 

[krabapple]

You don’t need “all walls dead” at all. I bet that would sound as bad in immersive as in 2ch.

Indeed. As you add more channels, the room becomes ever less a factor in the specular range. For the modal range it's always a factor.

And I read a lot of kvetching that seems to come mostly people who haven’t heard an immersive setup geared to music.

I'm good with 5.2 (two subs) for now, but I'm sure I'll get around to Atmos configuration eventually.

I upmix everything that's 2 channel, and have a lot of multichannel music mixes. I'll never go back to stereo, which just sounds amusingly quaint to me now.

 

[krabapple]

I think this is a big part of the problem: the quality of the mixes is very inconsistent. This may or may not get fixed over time.

Or not...it's still an issue with 5.1 mixes. And those have been around for decades now.

I don't think there's one 'Way' it should be done, it really depends on the source material. And some mix engineers are just consistently better than others, IME (Eliot Scheiner: yay! Steve Wilson: patchy!)

 

[FriedChicken]

It is absolutely possible to fault them without being naive about how the market works. Just because something is legal and commonplace doesn't make it above being called out and criticized. In fact, as creators and consumers it more than ever falls on us because, as you stated, for the most part tech journalists are no longer doing their jobs.

I guess I wasn't super clear. I guess I meant to say "Dolby should create an open standard" shows a bit of naïvety. What Dolby does takes an enormous amount of overhead and research dollars. The same thing cannot be achieved in the open-source realm. Dolby does "deserve" credit for their work.

What's worth calling out, though, is anti-consumer industry practices, and maybe just reporting on implications for the industry as a whole so the consumer remains informed. When intel gained out on AMD in the x86 CPU duopoly and had about a decade of only marginal single-core performance improvements in their CPUs, I kept my Ivy Bridge setup without upgrading, knowing any improvements were marginal. That wouldn't stop me recommending a newer PC to someone, but did stop me wasting my money on an upgrade that was moot. There's a fine distinction here I guess.

 

[Curvature]

I guess I wasn't super clear. I guess I meant to say "Dolby should create an open standard" shows a bit of naïvety. What Dolby does takes an enormous amount of overhead and research dollars. The same thing cannot be achieved in the open-source realm. Dolby does "deserve" credit for their work.

Wholly untrue. There are vast open source libraries and tools in the academy and sciences. Many are on Github or being moved there from older platforms.

Work on immersive audio in ambisonics and more esoteric multichannel format uses open source containers.

A good example is https://opensoundcontrol.stanford.edu/ The protocol (when you say "Atmos", the discussion is about panning and object manipulation tools) is used in SPAT, which was developed partially privately and partially publicly by France's IRCAM. SPAT is one of the main DAWs for multichannel production, btw.

 

[FriedChicken]

Wholly untrue. There are vast open source libraries and tools in the academy and sciences. Many are on Github or being moved there from older platforms.

Work on immersive audio in ambisonics and more esoteric multichannel format uses open source containers.

A good example is https://opensoundcontrol.stanford.edu/ The protocol (when you say "Atmos", the discussion is about panning and object manipulation tools) is used in SPAT, which was developed partially privately and partially publicly by France's IRCAM. SPAT is one of the main DAWs for multichannel production, btw.

I'll look into this, but my hopes are not high. My experience with open source software, when looking for a solution, has been one of pain and suffering for mediocrity... It's almost always a disorganized mess of crap with a few nuggets of excellence scattered throughout.

 

[FriedChicken]

Actually I can't let it rest at that. You pointed to a stanford website about audio technologies. That's not a solution, that's an idea that exists in fairy tale land. The delta between that and my home theater room is so huge, you could fit planets inside. Good luck getting that standardized, implemented in hardware and software, implemented in the mixing studios, implemented with the content creators, the players, the full stack. It could be done, but it requires earnest organized effort that open source flat-out fails on.

Open-source proponents are often fanatical and oblivious to the real world - drumming up achievements like they are the God that brought light to the earth, while ignoring shortcomings, or the achievements of industry. Open source solutions didn't bring us CDs, that took huge efforts on the parts of Philips and Sony. It didn't bring us the mass-scale silicon manufacturing for all the chips we have, didn't design the chips. Didn't bring cars. Cargo ships. Airplanes. Roads. Often the open source development hopes to and is proud to achieve what industry already achieved in decades past.

Then there's actually using open-source solutions, which remain for the most part utter garbage. Linux is terrible and always has been terrible. Try to get your mother to use Linux as a desktop OS lol. Python is hot garbage when you need to actually get stuff done. Matlab wins. Microsoft office is way better than Libreoffice or whatever abomination linux users are forced to use. Photoshop reigns supreme for a reason (despite adobe's terrible subscription model). I was looking for a replacement to my WDTV media player. Unfortunately the best solution is Kodi. Getting something like that set up requires days of misery and delving into the deep recesses of the 2nd and 3rd pages of google searhc, along with sacrificing a few chickens that you find what you want/need.

I'm sorry to be so forceful, but to merely shouting "BUT OPEN SOURCE" only distracts from the issue and gets in the way.

 

[FriedChicken]

And to be clear, I'm neither a proponent of industry or a adversary of open source solutions.

I'm well aware of what the open-source model has brought to the world. It simply doesn't apply here. It just doesn't.

 

[jhenderson0107]

Actually I can't let it rest at that... ...merely shouting "BUT OPEN SOURCE" only distracts from the issue and gets in the way.

I regret that I have but one 'Like' to give to this post.