Critiquing a technology does not equate to hate (this is just audio after all). Do you have any substantive rebuttals to his critique?
Let's get stuck in, this should be fun!
Of course, we can skip the ceiling speakers in favour of upward-firing speaker modules that sit atop our existing fronts and/or rears. These exploit ceiling bounce to cover off Atmos’s height component. But there is no universal ceiling height. The higher the ceiling, the greater the audio signal’s time delay. The greater the time delay, the later sound arrives at the ear. And then we have to ask: just how close are these phantom speakers to those of a proper Atmos system?
If only Atmos receivers could somehow compensate for this by setting the speaker distance and adding a small amount of delay to each speaker so that everything works correctly. Maybe they could even automate this process with some kind of measurement microphone? Oh wait, they do.
No matter how good Wilson’s Atmos remix – and I’m sure it’s fantastic – having to wire in an additional eight loudspeakers (seven if I’m already running a subwoofer) just to enjoy one album in an alternative version is – I’m sure you would agree – madness.
A good helping of
reductio ad absurdum here, conveniently ignoring those who already have a 5.1 setup and for whom the Atmos experience just needs a couple of extra speakers and a new receiver. Just as I'm sure Darko has listened to more than one album on whatever two-channel setup he has, the suggestion that we should judge Atmos on the merit of using it for a single album is ludicrous.
only the most committed of listeners would rewire their lounge room in order to access those discs’ Atmos mixes and to sit at the extreme end of hardware-first audiophilia
Conveniently excluding anyone who likes films again.
Their newly installed Dolby Atmos system would only be good for a dozen albums
Pure Audio Recordings has 99 Atmos albums listed. Fortunately, an Atmos setup can also be used to play many other forms of recordings, so if Darko is complaining about the effort of moving from a 2.0 setup to Atmos, he really ought to take into account the thousands of multichannel SACD, DVD-A and other recordings out there.
If we hunt and peck for Atmos-loaded Blu-ray discs out on the Internet – beyond the scope of the SDE store –
Someone better tell this guy about Amazon.
Any Spatial Audio equivalent offered by Apple Music, or the 360 Reality Audio served up by Tidal, will be heavily compressed with a lossy codec.
How about double-blind testing whether this is an issue, and if so, how severe it is? Maybe even compressed Atmos delivers enough of an experience to be worth it compared to stereo.
Now we must ask: how close does a headphone’s binaural take on Dolby Atmos get to the same album played back via a properly configured 7.1.2 speaker system in a room? And therefore: is it really Atmos? Flipping that question on its head, if Apple Music’s Spatial Audio is just as good as in-room Atmos, why bother with speakers?
No; yes; and since the answer to the first question is no, this question is moot, but anyway: how about listening to music with other people? Ever got tired of wearing headphones?
In an ironic twist, any headphone-based binaural conversion is, by definition, not as the artist (or remixer) intended.
This could be said of any setup and any album. Of course headphones are going to be an approximation, and the engineers at Apple or wherever will have done a lot of work to figure out the best way to represent all those channels in headphones.
Soundbar manufacturers want us to believe that a tube containing a multitude of drivers, a sub and a pair of wireless rear channels can approximate 7.1.2... If faking ceiling and wall speakers with reflected sound works as effectively as many manufacturers claim, why bother with real ceiling and wall speakers?
Darko begs the question and then ignores the answer he's already given.
My own experience with the
€900 Sonos ARC was a major disappointment. Listening from my couch, I was
here and the sound was
over there. Worse: the ARC’s clipped the beginning of each song as I skipped through an Apple Music Spatial Audio playlist, presumably because its decoder needs half a second to wake up. It couldn’t even do gapless playback with Apple Music Spatial content.
Well, there's a bunch of criticisms about a bad implementation of one product, but those specific complaints don't mean there's anything wrong with the concept.
Per previous attempts at elevating format quality, Dolby Atmos is, once again, asking us to re-buy our favourite albums dressed up once again as The Next Best Thing™.
This is a story as old as time. People complained about re-buying their vinyl albums when CDs came out. Fortunately, nobody's forcing you, and you can choose to invest in the albums that are made for Atmos instead.
The Next Best Thing™ of yesteryear – SACD, DVD-A, DSD and MQA – all demanded that we buy our albums again and new hardware to play them. Where are those formats now?
On my CD rack, playable on the same system that plays Atmos. Just because they stop producing the discs doesn't mean you have to stop listening to them.
In 2023, we have to make peace with immersive audio streaming being lossy. And I have to wonder how many bleeding-edge audiophiles already titillated by Atmos will be down with that
Those who aren't can go and buy discs. Everyone wins.
Dolby Atmos playback at home is the epitome of inconvenience: it forces us into a multi-channel array of loudspeakers
Yes, being held at gunpoint while upgrading my living room was an experience I don't want to go through again, that's for sure.
I’m not into audio to improve the sound of a hundred or so albums. I’m interested in audio tech that will improve the sound of – or access to – an entire music collection.
Move the goalposts and miss out then. I wouldn't want every film ever made to be remade in 3D but it's still fun to watch a film in 3D every now and then.
for this listener, the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze.
(emphasis mine) At last, a reasonable point, albeit tacked on to an incorrect statement. Atmos isn't for everyone, and it doesn't deliver a perfect experience in all environments. Expecting it to be either of those things is unreasonable.
Criticising Atmos because it's a platform that gives something both to the serious listener willing to invest time, money and effort in setting up their system and the casual listener who just wants to stream something to their soundbar or headphones doesn't really make sense. Whatever setup anyone chooses will compromise on something, but that's true of all products ever made.
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