What is Your Opinion of Atmos Music?

While I never cared much about home theatre sound, but after seeing Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite in a good theatre (last film before covid, that’s a while back :-) where surround really added to the house-as-character motif, I became interested. So when my hand-me-down stereo DAC died I replaced it with an 8-channel.

That was with regular surround in mind. Fortuitously, Apple’s macOS TV.app gained support for Atmos (up to 14 channels now) which means I could do 5.1.2 for example (or add another DAC and create an aggregated device via CoreAudio to get more).

I haven’t gone there yet (need amp channels and speakers, obviously). But I can listen to the binaural Atmos mix via headphones (AirPods Max) in the meantime. I’m one of those people who hears headphone soundstage more-or-less in a line transecting my ears so I’ve never been much of a head-fi enthusiast. But the Spatial Audio mix (aka Atmos) usually improves things, moving the main soundstage forward and and expanding it generally (I listen to studio-assembled music for the most part so I’m not pursuing venue sound, so no comment on that).

So far that works from TV.app (where it’s quite uncanny) and Music.app on recent macOS, iPadOS and iPhoneOS devices (and from an Apple TV hardware box too of course). As Apple Music is my usual source that’s pretty helpful. The head tracking is ok but I little off right as I turn from centre. I’ve set up the personal spatial profile by doing the LiDAR ear scan thing, which helped a bit.

Apart from encouraging up-to-date hardware (the source of Apple’s gratuitous billions) there’s no extra charge for hi-res or spatial.

@axo1989 , Atmos will "see" your speaker setup (2,5,7,11, whatever) and do its best to place each sound object in the mix. I have tried atmos with only two speakers and a subwoofer and compared to stereo and in my rig I notice a difference in the soundstage and the bass. You can compare yourself and see how you like. 

This is a short video on the best Atmos speaker setup, using height channels in the front and back of the room right above your front and rear speakers:

@kota1 Haha thanks, I don't generally watch YT with funny faces and amped-up headlines on the splash screen (which is to say I barely watch YT at all :-) but I understand Atmos basics.

Apple Music doesn't play spatial (Atmos) to a stereo setup by default, but it can be set to do so. I've tried this on some recent releases done with Atmos and hi-res but I can't say any difference in stereo image or tonality jumps out at me. Changing the player preferences is a couple of steps so no instant switching. And I haven't really kicked back and relaxed into it to appreciate the subtleties on the level of old vs new DAC for example.

Steve Wilson on how he is mixing classic albums into Dolby Atmos. He states when Apple started offering Atmos the demand just exploded from 5.1 to Atmos overnight: