• Welcome to ASR. There are many reviews of audio hardware and expert members to help answer your questions. Click here to have your audio equipment measured for free!

What should a stereo system user know about Dolby Atmos?

Multicore

Major Contributor
Joined
Dec 6, 2021
Messages
3,563
Likes
4,271
I'm ignorant about many-channel audio technologies because we only use two-channel playback here. But our systems have fancy digital streaming (computers, phones, WiiMs) and some of the services put a Dᗡ ATMOS badge on some of the releases. What does this mean for us, I wonder?

Iiuc, Atmos is a N-channel format in which the channels are described by a metadata schema more flexible than the old (front left, center, etc) loudspeaker position labels. The M-channel playback system has knowledge of its own configuration/positioning and with that and the Atmos channel metadata makes for each output channel a suitable mix of the input channels. That sounds like an interesting problem but I don't know if the algorithm for producing the N:M matrix is included in the Atmos standard or are playback system builders, installers, users supposed to design that?

In all our cases M = 2. What do I need to know about N:2 downmixing when we see the Dᗡ ATMOS badge in the streaming app?
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom