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by basisword
1077 days ago
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>> This is a smart, motivated audio engineer talking about Atmos. Quick summary: it's awful when it works perfectly, and it almost never works perfectly, in fact, it rarely works at all. Good luck trying to get Atmos working, and even if this was a completely open standard, would you really bother? I hope he had more to say than that, because that’s nonsense. Getting it “working” is as simple as playing it on Apple Music via my AirPods or Sonos. There are definitely bad mixes available, but there are some incredible ones too. Listening to “Let It Be” on the Sonos is magical. I’ve also done some mixing in Atmos and it’s pretty straightforward. At the end of the day it’s largely subjective, but I’m pretty certain it’s the future - especially now Sonos has stated releasing single devices that can play Atmos to a pretty good standard, and most new major label releases are mixed in Atmos. |
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Yes, he did. A lot. I suggest you watch the video. He goes into how Atmos isn't anything new, it's not unique, how it's a basic money grab, how it would be better as an open standard, how Atmos is fine if you like it (as music listening is purely subjective), how remixes of music in Atmos are generally objectively terrible (and, in most cases, not what the artist would have wanted) and a lot more.
Benn Jordan tries very hard to be unbiased and well researched in almost everything he presents. For him to come to the conclusion that Atmos isn't really worth the cost barrier to entry is something I (and many others) will take into account. I'd say Dolby Labs would also do well to take it into account, but they don't have a very good track record with listening to valuable criticism. When it comes to criticism, their noise reduction is perhaps too effective.
It's also worth noting that they love re-inventing surround sound and charging licensing fees for the privilege to put a badge on your product ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby#Dolby_surround_systems ).
IMHO Atmos is the 3D TV of audio, except it could be good if it was an open standard.
FYI, as far as I can tell, Apple (and most others) are delivering Atmos in lossy formats. These may be good, but they aren't by any means state of the art for multi-channel. Server side de-muxing of spatial audio to the required number of channels would mean less overall processing (channel combos could be cached) and higher quality delivery using open standards (multi-channel FLAC supports up to 8 channels, and it's an open format which would allow easy extension). This would be better for the consumer (bandwidth is not an argument in these days of 4K+ video streaming), arguably better for the artists and publishers (better quality audio to the consumer), but it wouldn't make anywhere near as much money in licensing for Dolby.