Is Dolby Atmos a Flop For Home Theater Like 3DTV Was? 197
An anonymous reader writes: Object-based audio is supposed to be the future of surround sound. The ability to pan sound around the room in 3D space as opposed to fixed channel assignments of yesterday's decoders. While this makes a lot of sense at the cinema, it's less likely consumers rush to mount speakers on their ceilings or put little speaker modules on top of their existing ones to bounce sound around the room. Leading experts think this will be just a fad like 3DTV was. What do you think?
Ambisonics (Score:5, Interesting)
A more rational pannable surround could be implemented with just four speakers using Ambisonics [wikipedia.org]. It isn't patentable and doesn't sell lots of speakers so it will continue to be ignored.
Re:im a music mixer in hollywood... (Score:5, Interesting)
What could be done by reversing this process from the stream? There's a nifty trick on surround sound - some sounds you'll find the center channel is used for lyrics and the sides for instrumentals in songs, making it trivial to isolate them and get clean audio for redubbing with. If it works as you describe, would that make it easy to pull out individual instruments or effects? That could be useful for hobbyist remixers.
Re:im a music mixer in hollywood... (Score:4, Interesting)
What I'd like to hear is an orchestra recording which mics each instrument and gives each of them a channel. It'd be interesting to see how well Atmos can recreate the sound stage of a full orchestra.
If it can't do that properly, then it's a useless fad, because that's just presenting a "static" sound image, not a moving one. I have a strong suspicion it relies on moving sounds to mask the fact that it's not very accurate about positioning them.
Cinavia (Score:4, Interesting)
Cinavia killed any future sound innovation.
Whats the point of dolby n-teen when you can HEAR the fucking DRM squeaking and reverbing in the background?
Re:media cos killed it w/compression+Bitstarvation (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm guessing you are one of the people who failed this test: http://mp3ornot.com/ [mp3ornot.com]
If you can't reliably tell the difference then good for you, you can save a lot of money. For the rest of us it's pretty jarring though.