What is Your Opinion of Atmos Music?

Interesting responses, and I agree, they are both capable of providing an engaging and immersive experience. Fortunately it isn’t necessary to eliminate either one of them. But they ARE different, stereo is channel based and atmos is object based. The limitation of atmos is having to use so many speakers but for people who already have home theaters it is easy to try. If you subscribe to apple music or tidal atmos music comes with your subscription so it isn’t necessary to buy a bunch of blue rays or SACD. I don’t think this format will die out the way "surround" music has withered. The mixing engineers are creating new content constantly.

@kota1 

I've not heard Dolby Atmos myself but a friend of mine who has thinks it will be the next big thing.

The idea of a more immersive sonic experience certainly sounds interesting to me. Spatial audio seems to be the way forward and omnidirectional speakers do seem to be a clear step up from poorly designed boxed ones.

Can I ask what are the main differences to 5.1 and what do you mean by saying that atmos is 'object based'?

@cd318, 5.1 surround sound has an advantage of adding the center channel. Stereo was originally 3 channel and as you know two channel depends on a phantom center. Having a center channel in place makes the system a bit less dependent on a phantom center but that is a preference, not a necessity. Atmos adds another dimension of sound coming from above you. Think of what speakers on the left and right do, Speakers above and below give the engineer more possibilities to mix with. Objects are placed in the mixing software and are rendered as closely as possible to the mix with YOUR speaker setup. Here is a clip about object based sound:

5.1 is sufficient for surround and the only really considered submissions for surround Grammy's. I probably enjoy more surround music than movies here.

Not near as much as 10" two ways X 2.

@fuzztone you are correct, the majority of movies and shows streaming today are mixed in 5.1.

The majority of immersive/surround MUSIC streaming however is on apple music and tidal and mixed in atmos.