[patentatt]

I don't buy it, much recent content is nearly unintelligible on my pretty good 5.1 setup with a real AVR and real speakers, thats set up and tuned reasonably well. Older movies, from the 80's and 90's don't have this problem, just newer content. And so often it's not even a level problem, it's like the dialogue is deliberately muffled by an EQ or something. I can boost my center channel or use the AVR's speech enhancement control and it's still hard to understand. I kind of buy into the common complaint that it's the actors and actresses that don't know how to project their voices any more.

[psychphysic]

I seem to be failing to explain this...

In the 90s cutting edge cinema.audio was 5.1 systems (cinema digital audio) before that 2.1. You own a 5.1 system you say.

Today cutting edge is systems like Dolby Atmos Cinema which is a 128 virtual, 64 real speaker system.

Are you really saying you can't grasp that cinemas have moved on in audio system since the 80s?

[falcolas]

Atmos’ big feature is to place audio properly no matter how many - or how few - speakers you have.

As long as the receiver has identified the positions of your speakers accurately (something receivers have been capable of with a small microphone since the early 00’s) it should place sounds appropriately.

[psychphysic]

That's Home Atmos. What happens if you take the 128 channel Atmos Cinema inputs and just blindly make stereo out of them?

Perhaps suddenly the very quiet speech the sound engineer carefully made space for in location and frequency is suddenly muddied?

[falcolas]

That’s the thing, Atmos doesn’t care about channels, except for how to use them to represent a sound at render time. And that render is not embedded in the tracks, it’s calculated.

[psychphysic]

You think a home ATMOS system can take and process 128 real time channels at full audio quality!?