New sound immersion processes

You’ve bought into the hype machine. Youtube is filled with stuff like this. Excited, breathless, animated and silly. Atmos is probably good for movies, though.

There are 3 types of people in the world, those that make it happen, those that watch it happen, and those like @cleeds who ask, "Hey, what happened?"

The Audio Engineering Society is NOT a hype machine. Anyone remotely interested in what is happening can experience atmos :

The Comfortably Numb Dolby Atmos rendition on BluRay doesn't suck.

All HT is really kind of a mess. The vast majority of buyers of TV’s and music still want zero more speakers or 2. The number of speakers required, extra hardware, wiring, etc. makes it a very unappealing add-in for most homeowners.

I mean, yeah, I have a HT receiver and an integrated in my living room, but of my neighbors 100% of the rest of them have just a TV with TV speakers built in and some portable Bluetooth speakers.

We’ve been through this before with Dolby Pro Logic. There was a rush to convert brands from stereo to 100% HT which ended up being the wrong way to go.  It also became prohibitively expensive, I suspect due to the HDMI licensing and copy protection issues, though HDMI came after HT.  It seems to have paralyzed Theta Digital for a few years.

Don’t get me wrong, I love HT and it’s technology for movies but in terms of 5.1 or more speakers it is an absolutely niche market compared to 2 channel music systems.

@erik_squires 

Atmos sounds fine through two speakers, I don't see why you can't have both? I have a very nice DAC for streaming stereo, I can upmix to Dolby Surround if I want.

I have a very nice processor for Atmos, I can play Atmos mix through two speakers if I want.