Busy holiday season with all the family gatherings hasn't allowed me to sit long enough in my main listening room.
Now that I have, it seems to me that there's still a lot that needs to be done to improve Tidal Music's (and Amazon's) implementation of "Dolby Atmos" music. This might need a thread of it's own, but I need to clarify my presumptions in earlier posts here. On their website it states that only Android devices are supported. Okay. But I was able to play the tracks in my iPhone and in Windows without any warning or halt sign, so what gives? For one thing, the stream looks like (at least in Windows) it only has
two channels + the Atmos metadata (?). MAYBE. When you play a music track with Atmos formatting, Windows' "Dolby for Atmos Headphones" sign is displayed. As soon as you stop playing the track, it disappears. Media with absent Atmos metadata (e.g. Spotify, Foobar, JRiver etc.) does not activate the aforementioned sign. When one routes the audio into an analyzer, one sees only two channels. Play this file directly to your multichannel DAC and you get plain stereo -- yes, increased spatialization is clearly there, nevertheless, but it's not MCH as we normally understand it to be. This is completely different to the other demos that we've seen where Atmos metadata is always embedded in multichannel (6 at least) track containing media files. I've read other people say Atmos capable receivers don't play it as MCH audio as well.
But this isn't even the only issue! Play
regular old songs in the Tidal app and you get the pop up sign "Dolby Atmos for Headphones" ! What the F---!? Why is this activated just in this music app? Talk about false advertisment...
This begs the question, what exactly is Tidal and Amazon's target audience here? Headphone and smart speaker users? I thought, we'd finally get "thousands" of MCH surround music tracks to stream with this innovation, but apparently the design, as it stands, seems incomplete at best, and nothing more than utter gimmicky-hype with false flags and dubious claims all over the place (as per usual with Tidal) at worst.
And here are more
annoying as hell things with DTS:X and Atmos Decoding in Windows, with the headphone plugins disabled and 5.1/7.1ch setting selected, you don't actually get any benefit from the Dolby Access software unless you route your audio directly to a compatible receiver. Bummer. On the other hand, if you purchased the DTS:X codec license, it does seem to work and improve the sound coming out from my MCH speaker system -- with media accompanied by a DTS:X audio stream. Yay! (
although maybe it's all just my dumb imagination?) The only thing is that it's hard to know if it's working correctly as you don't get a specific sign stating clearly that "DTS:X processing is enabled" if you play a file with said audio format.
Moreover, with every media file played that has
ostensibly object-based surround metadata, the specific sign/banner (DTS:X or Atmos -- and even Windows Sonic!) that pops up will be
almost always the one that you selected initially.
So if you selected Atmos, even if you play a file with DTS:X or other DTS audio stream(s), the sign that pops up would be "Dolby Atmos for Headphones". Same with streamed media: if I play an ("Atmos" or none-Atmos) music track in the Tidal Music app, the sign "DTS Headphone:X in use" will show up if that's the selection I made beforehand.
This is incredibly stupid. The operating system is not intelligent enough to automatically apply the correct decoder plugin according to the metadata format header of the media being played.
Windows Notification:
Pop-up sign/indicator when clicking the volume icon:
In fact, play
almost any file with either DTS or Dolby format stream and you get the banner/sign popping up. I tried to factor out my software player by playing files directly with the Windows "Movies & TV" app. Although, as I mentioned, it doesn't pop up with every media file I've tested e.g. some mkv files with 2ch Dolby Digital stream only, and the demo media with dolby streams that aren't specifically DD or DD+ e.g. Dolby TrueHD (with and without the Atmos metadata -- not that said Windows app can play it correctly, natively, anyhows) -- for that, you need a third party player like PowerDVD.
Current state of these "futuristic, innovative" formats in Windows is... a complete mess! Yep, if you use a HTPC, bitstreaming/routing audio directly to Atmos or DTS:X ready receivers via HDMI may be necessary for quite a while -- If you want to avoid more unecessary headaches... That's all I can honestly say.
