How to Setup Your Room for Atmos and Immersive Audio

60/40 or 70/30 for absorbing/reflective surfaces as a rule of thumb. Good one. 

More reasons to do Atmos, it is mushrooming:

I’m a believer in the potential benefits of more channels for musical listening. I’ve listened to some Apple Music in 7.1 - no height channels. I thought it was interesting to hear older recordings re-mastered in multi-channel. Some of them worked really well, others seemed to gain little from it. As for two channel mixes in Atmos - some of them work better than others. I don’t hear it as a game changing improvement for 2 channel playback but the fact that the same multi-channel recording can gracefully scale back to 2 channel playback seems like a good thing. For now I’m listening to everything in 2 channel format, matrix up-mixed to 3 speaker playback and finding it to be overall preferable. What I’d like to experiment with is mixing the left, center, and right channels of an Atmos mix back down to 2 channel, and then I’d mix them back up to 3 channel using my own matrix. I want to do this because I don’t like how most Atmos recordings treat center imaged sounds. They play the left and right channels along with the center, or sometimes not the center at all. It’s just plain stereo with a phantom center image. I prefer a strong use of the center channel. From what I can tell it’s not easy to get access to the individual digital channel streams from an Atmos recording so that you can manipulate them to your liking.

Unlike stereo Atmos is mixed so it will translate on any platform. I like the remixes they have done in Atmos like the Beatles but the mixes that are new so the artist is able to translate their intentions in the Atmos palate continue to amaze. Check out some of the dedicated channels for Spatial audio in Apple Music, particularly new album drops:

“As a stereo mixer, what keeps me awake at night is how my mixes are going to translate on someone’s headphones, in a club, on the kitchen radio or on a very nice pair of Focal home hi-fi speakers. I have one mix that has to serve all platforms. Atmos for music is actually a dynamic format so when I create an Atmos mix, it will adapt to the device that it is playing on. Play it on your Sonos Soundbar which is 5.1.2, and it will optimise to play on that device. Play it on your Sennheiser 660 headphones and you’ll get the binaural mix and so on.”

@donavabdear

How is your studio setup going? Are you going to isolate it from the HT?