Finally got around to watching Atomic Blonde (which was awesome) in DTS:X. Overall sound was good, but nothing overhead really stood out to me. I also don't think there were many opportunities for overhead, but overall the sound mix was very good.
I didn't take notes of everything, but I do remember when the car dove into the water, I could clearly hear the water rushing in overhead. The fireworks during the Berlin Wall coming down part were overhead. I recall there was a plane flying overhead at some point too I noticed. I'm pretty sure there was some other stuff too (little things). It wasn't Harry Potter or Jumanji, but it wasn't the original The Fast and the Furious (where I noticed like nothing overhead in DTS:X) either and that one had a GREAT soundtrack for 7.1, which was still an improvement over the old 5.1 soundtrack.
I really wonder what other people's Atmos/X systems sound like. I keep thinking maybe my side height speakers are screwing things up in "top middle" (not quite as high due to the steel beam, putting them 10 inches lower than the front/rear heights and almost 2 feet to the right being on the side wall compared to the front/rear heights too) and yet I hear more direct overhead sounds than I do front/rear on average and certainly Red Tails flew right overhead across the room as did some other movies here and there (Flatliners at the start put sounds like everywhere overhead LOUD) so I don't know what might be setup/speaker layout and/or soundtrack differences sometimes.
I keep getting the impression it's the soundtracks that aren't loud enough overhead, not the setup. I did tests before I even got the AVR by hooking up the front height and top middle/side height to my old Yamaha receiver as 4.0 and putting it in multi-channel stereo mode so ALL sounds would be overhead in stereo and played sound effects like storms/thunder, birds, etc. and they were all imaging beautifully overhead between the two sets of speakers. Binaural did even better. It's why I figured my system would work, but I have to say some of these Atmos and X soundtracks give me pause and keep making me wonder if I should have gone all on-ceiling and/or in-ceiling or whatever. But then when I read someone with IN-CEILING isn't hearing much overhead in a given movie either, I'm definitely wondering what's wrong with some of these soundtracks.
I really wish there was a demo similar to the DTS:X "moving ball" one but where the ball just flies only overhead in like switchback patterns or something so we could really test the accuracy of the overhead imaging across its entire range. Most of these trailers are just too limited in what they put overhead to judge correctly whether everything images "everywhere" in the room on the ceiling.
I did just download (using my the Dolby app for Mac downloading) the 9.1.6 demo from Dolby's site. I've read that THIS version has "snap to" turned OFF for the front wides so they should image correctly on my hybrid system. It'll be interesting to see how they sound as the demo disc version just played through the front mains here (except when I had my 7010 hooked up where they played discretely at the wides, but the other demos sounded the same with or without them turned on in that regard which makes me think they were all "snap to OFF" and the front/sides imaged perfectly fine without the wides in my room.
