Does it matter? They need 9+ speakers to mix & master.
Yes when they say 80% of plays are atmos those are headphone plays. I guess on some level it doesn’t matter but really the format will mostly be consumed on headphones.
I don’t know anyone personally with any atmos home setup and if they did it would be a soundbar “atmos”. Just another logo on the box of some sound bar they were going to buy anyway.
Nobody I know will retro wire a room and mount ceiling speakers and that includes the most diehard multichannel friends I know.
They do 5.1 at most and even that with speakers in the pattern of the old Dolby surround or pro logic with rear dipoles just sitting somewhere around in the side/back. It didn’t matter in those formats as they were used for cinema fill tracks.
Nobody I know has setup a true ITU pattern for surround music. Only some of the SACD and DVD-A folks did that way back when those formats came out. That’s still very few.
Leave alone anyone setting up an atmos system for music. I know we have a few here but we niche already and that would be a niche within a niche.
Good that apple pushed the production of it and that sells monitors for production but all that consumption they talk about is mostly on headphones and crap setups like soundbars.
The worst thing about it all is that your sofa can’t even have a headrest if you intend to listen to it in a real space. That ruled it out for me right there.
What’s the point of rear speakers perfectly positioned and aimed when my ears are occluded by my sofa from those rears? I have 8341s ready to go. I could add a center monitor and give it whirl. I have so many speakers around here I could test it with different speakers for proof of concept.
However the sofa occlusion thing just kills it. You pretty much need to consume it in a similar setup as was required to produce it.
Which is like 9 speakers around you perfectly positioned and time aligned and calibrated. Fine. But the sitting on an office chair right in the correct spot always is a real pain. Comfort matters.
Headphones are the way this will consumed. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve heard some really great things in VR spatial audio.
I tried a few tracks on AirPods Pro with atmos and that’s the real advantage of the first party stuff - it includes head tracking. I don’t really remember anything special about it.
So it’s like yeah people are playing these atmos tracks but they don’t even know that they are. They probably think it’s just a regular stereo song.