Immersive Audio and How to Achieve It

I’m old school, I’ll take a great soundstage over surround sound any day!

"100% of music listeners prefer live music to recorded playback..."  

 Ive come home from many live performances quite sure that the sound I can create in my living room is better than what I just heard. Blanket statements like this  are only good for creating arguments...

@audiodidact

I agree you can have good or bad recordings in immersive audio. The processor or receiver has controls that allow you to select two channel, or upmix to any of several selections (Dolby Surround, DTS Neural or Neo-X, Audyssey DSX, Auro-3D, etc). You can tailor the song to your room.

As for the band being in front of you the engineers refer to this as the artists intent and try and reproduce it. There are many artists that discuss this on Dolby’s channel like:

https://youtu.be/x4V2q2stRjM

BTW, your system looks amazing, why the bare walls though? Room treatments?

@mahler123 

I would like to experiment with a true Atmos setup.  However I have a drop ceiling 

There are advantages to using front and rear height channels, mounted high on the wall, see the pic of my system or the pic above of abbey road studios. They are easy to wall mount but I chose tall stands because active speakers are heavy. See:

https://www.svsound.com/products/prime-elevation

And I might sell the house in a couple of years as we downsize

Those prime elevation speakers are wall mounted, no drilling holes in the ceiling. I recommend you look at the Onkyo RZ50 receiver, I use Onkyo in the mancave (which also has a drop ceiling, I wall mounted the height channels)

@mihorn 

Great system, are those auralex panels? I had great results with auralex.  

The quality of the sound is more important in hi-end audio.

I agree, this doesn't need to be an either/or binary decision. With an immersive system you can use as many speakers as you want, from 2 to 22, depending on the song and the recording to get the quality you want. Atmos is backward compatible, object oriented audio. Its not channel based, but will still play back on two speakers. The vast majority of the tracks I play are mixed in stereo and I upmix them.