What HiFi and Atmos

PS - Yeah, I’m not taking Atmos seriously at all. I mean, it IS high tech, but for many reasons, for music, I see this as similar to MQA, a whole new marketing brand desperately trying to fulfill a need I never had.

I mean, wasn't DVD and then BluRay music 2 and 4x better than CD's?  How is that going? Nowhere.  Absolutely nowhere.

Even for movies getting to 5 speakers in the home is a big lift for most. Now you want height speakers too?  Hahahahahah. For the 10 seconds of effects in a movie that use them?  Please.  This technology is far better reserved for actual theaters than home technology.

@erik_squires

Thank you for starting this thread! I have an MQA streamer with a Bluesound Node and a Dolby Atmos streamer with an X-Box Series S. Atmos is very, very enjoyable on my rig which has been meticulously setup to support immersive audio. You just can’t compare object based and channel based. My advice is to not make this about either/or. Take advantage of both. The other thing is how much more can they do with two channel in terms of the files? The best two channel is analog vinyl and it probably peaked more than twenty years ago. Atmos is very early and is getting better every month IMO. The classic albums remastered in Atmos are nice. The NEW music being mastered in Atmos is more interesting.
Myth- You need more than two speakers for Atmos. No, it plays back fine with two speakers or headphones.

Myth- You can slap any speaker on the ceiling to do atmos. No, Atmos has very clear specs by dolby and is easy to follow because the specs are the same for the studios as they are the consumer.

So, I think this is a healthy debate and I am not advocating one is better universally. I am advocating to have both.
I don’t want to hijack your thread but the stuff to check out is NOT from the labels, NOT from Dolby but from the engineers who have been mixing in two channel. Just listen to what they have to share about mixing in atmos, and keep in mind, this is still like less than 5 years since Apple launched spatial audio, very early days.

I’m not against listeners enjoying 50 channel music if that’s their thing.

I just don’t see the need en masse. If it does take off it’s going to be like the Windows tax, when you could not buy a PC without also paying Microsoft, regardless of your choice of OS.

The other thing to keep in mind is that object based sound reproduction always puts a CPU and software between the speakers and the source, so the idea of bit-perfect reproduction goes entirely out the window.

I think what we really need are drone Atmos speakers.  So you can deploy them and have them move around to the ideal location without physically installing anything.  Of course, they'd have to be rechargeable.