Speaker Selection Strategies For Atmos Music

@Deep_33

Thanks for posting that Steve Wilson interview.  That's pretty much the same info the poeple I know on the mix side say to me.  He's honest about the binaural nature of air pods, but basing your acceptance of ATMOS based on that alone is not enough to end it.  Its APPLE's tech that developed air pods and it may not necessarily represent the future of ATMOS.  Its worth noting that it is possible to have a good air pod presentation or a bad one, via how a given piece is arranged and mixed.  There are engineers out there figuring it out. 

The discrete channel playback is a challenge but the challenge of it doesnt mean we should give up.  When done correctly its extraordinary.  Yes it costs more than two spealers but it does not cost 300K. 

Brad

With most of the modern A/V HT receivers with ATMOS decoding, you can choose a 5.1 or 7.1 set up just on the floor and no overheads.  Since its object based, the software is supposed to "pull" the 7.1  out of the avaiable info and ignore the overrheads (which would be 11.1 if you had overheads)..  THis gives you one of the nicest things in ATMOS, the side surrounds which are brilliant at motion- especially important in movies.

@lonemountain

The main items that got debunked by Steven Wilson is Darko’s age old assumption that there is barely any native mixes/ material available for atmos music, which is simply untrue.

Record companies are pushing every new artist/album in the direction of both stereo and atmos mixes.

90+ % of the best selling albums last year have atmos mixes available. 35% of apple’s entire catalog has some type of spatial/object based audio mix available. Leave Dolby aside, Sony is the new player here pushing artists into 360 reality audio, etc.

Last, but, not the least, the upmixers do a pretty good job of salvaging trashy stereo mixes in the absence of a native atmos mix.

Due to height virtualization available within the codecs in newer atmos processors, one could even possibly get away with no heights anymore.

A stereo purist already has 2 speakers and 2 subs. If those 2 speakers are worth their salt, he wouldn’t even need a center channel. All he would need to do is add 2 surrounds. 360 reality, atmos or even Yamaha’s own dsp works quite well with just 4 speakers and 2 subs for music.

I was listening to a guy’s half a million dollar stereo rig this weekend (set up quite well). But, it simply hits a wall and falls short, unable to reach the envelopment, immersion, closer to "live", etc experience of a correctly set up object based audio rig. It is still stuck with the poor DR stereo recordings. It is just the limitation of channel based stereo and one can’t overcome it.

@kota1 has some good suggestions above.

But, as far as hifi atmos or object based audio goes, it is really quite simple.

For example, if a guy has 2 Borresen X1 standmounts and 2 subs for his stereo, all he would need to do is add 2 more of the same for surrounds.

If a guy has 2 Mofi Sourcepoint 8 standmounts and 2 subs for his stereo, All he would need to do is add 2 more of the same for surrounds.

Assuming a stereo guy already has a high fidelity power amplifier for his stereo, he would just need to add one more amp for his surrounds and get the right processor with height virtualization.

It is so not too expensive or all that complex. Most of these guys spend more on "extremely poor returns on sonics" wire/cables than a extra pair of speakers some days.

I am not sure I agree with the suggestion that you can skip the side surrounds as Kota suggests above (although I usually like his posts). From

my own experience the side surround is super critical to conveying space in music and motion in movies. And I’ve also discovered the side needs to be placed forward-before the half point to rears. The sense of motion is affected by this.

i do agree you can get by with one set of overheads for movies but only IF you have side surrounds. Upper motion is not so possible with just one L/R overhead set and that may be important to the movie. Say top gun maverick or something like that.

oh and Kota has it right about subs- two at a minimum and I would go front and back.  ATMOS suffers from a lack of bass in the back if you think of the room as a 3D space.  Thata picture of blackbird and the big rig we did in there, that started as 3 then 4 and then 6: one left and right, two centered, one left right rears.   That sound pretty good.  And it is possible to use small inexpensive subs here as quantity wins in smoothing the room out. I say better to have multiple small ones than one big one. 
Brad