How to Setup Your Room for Atmos and Immersive Audio

@donavabdear 

if I get to excited about mixing for the rears and the tops my mix won't translate like it should back to 5.1 or stereo

I guess you know your client base and until someone asks for an Atmos mix no need to go there. Better to setup your 5.1 setup just right first.

And treatment for your HT need not be ugly. I went with Auralex because I love bamboo. All of those wooden diffusors you see in my pics are made from sustainable bamboo. It sounded better than fiberglass diffusors in my room. There are plenty of vendors to suit your taste, ASC stuff looks great and is very functional. If you get an Attack Wall the same company could treat both spaces:

here is the hot tip for the most advanced information on multi-channel speaker positioning from the world’s leader on this subject. when i was positioning my own 9.3.6 multichannel set-up, i choose the Trinnov approach instead of the Dolby Atmos approach for my ceiling after much research.

looks like the link to the pdf does not work properly. so google "Trinnov Multichannel playbook", scroll down to "Loudspeaker Position Guide -AVS Forum", then select to get the download of the PDF, then open the PDF.

http://file:///C:/Users/mplav/Downloads/Trinnov_Loudspeaker_Position_Guide_2020.pdf

Thanks @mikelavigne , I got it. I like this better than the guide Dolby puts out, more detailed. I was watching an interview of Peter Lyngdorf who felt the ideal number of speakers in a HT was less than 16, I think he felt the max he says you should do was around 12. I am very glad I saw that video because it saved me $$$ on upgrading to one of the 16 channel processors. The best resource I found for listening to MCH music was Tomlinson Holman’s research when he was working with Audyssey. They found that wide channels were more important than rear surrounds or height channels. (see page 23 in the Trinnov Guide linked below) I A/B with and without wide channels and find his research to be spot on. This link might work:

@donavabdear

This is one of the reasons I like Tom Holman’s work. BTW, if you haven’t checked out @mikelavigne virtual system yet I think you’ll find it a great (perfect?) example of room setup:

Tomlinson Holman research on wide’s states:

1) The front half of the room is more important than the back half!
What is perhaps the most repeated mantra I heard during my visit was how the decision to add 2 rear channels when 7 channel sound offered itself as an improvement over 5 channels is according to Audyssey, a serious error. IF these extra channels are available, they should be added to the front, NOT the rear. Why? Human hearing has far better spatial acuity in the front of us than we do behind us. According to Tom Holman, we can resolve auditory spatial information to about 1 degree in angle in front of us from right to left, (Horizontal plane) and about 3 degrees in height (Vertical plane). Both of these sensitivities are far greater than what we have for sounds coming from behind us. Hence Audyssey’s preference of multiple channels in front and sides, and one required for rear channel sound.

2) Width is more important than height!
Width is crucially important in placing instruments and recreating acoustical space. Concert halls with side walls perpendicular to the stage are considered by experts on the subject to be acoustically superior spaces to fan shaped halls. One of the reasons here is the importance of the early reflections from the right and left side walls perpendicular to the stage. In the "fan shaped" concert halls, the splayed side walls did not support the same kind of early reflections and are one of the main reasons these halls are not judged as good by the experts. To quote Mr Holman, "it is known in concert hall acoustics that the first side wall reflection is the single most important reflection direction, it sets the auditory source width... Channels constrained to plus/minus 30 degrees are too narrow for that". For this reason, the DSX standards (7.1, 9.1 and 10.2) support a left wide and right wide channel at plus/minus 60 degrees to reproduce the kind of side wall reflection you would hear if you were seated in a great concert hall."