I believe we've discussed this many times already, but it's cool to refresh it.
Atmos/DTSX have great potential. All of us here who have actually experienced Atmos/DTSX in our homes have seen the great potential.
But it is up to the sound engineers who does the mixing for the home BluRay Atmos/DTSX.
I was rewatching "Jurassic Word" and "JW Fallen Kingdom" in 4K/DTSX this weekend.
Jurassic Word, eh? Hmmm. I must have missed that one. It wasn't a religious movie was it?
And the Word became scales (or feathers as it were) and HE was among us! T-Rex!
For some reasons, I noticed a lot more overhead sound effects this time around. I mentioned previously that I was "disappointed" in the 1080p/DTSX mixes. But this time around I was a lot more impressed since (for some reasons) I heard a lot more overhead sound effects.
Did you have the overheads turned up +6dB the first time?
I actually heard quite a bit overhead in Fallen Kingdom. I heard jack squat in the original overhead. I just watched Tokyo Drift and not much overhead there either. I put on Crimson Peak or Harry Potter and tons of stuff overhead. The problem, as you say, are the film mixing guys. There seems to be this notion that surround sound shouldn't be "distracting" and therefore while you are I might find it odd that there's birds making noises only in the front of the room in Annihiliation, they think it would be utterly devatstating to the plot of the movie if you heard birds all around you in those scenes as it would distract you from the non-dialog in those scenes to the point where you are taken out of the movie.... Um. Yeah, that didn't sound right to me either. I'm actually taken out of the movie when I see a forest scene and birds are only coming from the screen and NOTHING around me. Am I watching the scene from inside a building? Why isn't the forest making sounds all around me? Oh, it's because the sound guy didn't bother....
The funny thing is there's a sound guy or two on AVS and if you question a word the guy says (and let me tell you some of the things he says aren't always coherent... "When I'm going to the ceiling..." (uh) (I don't want to quote out of context, but the guy basically seemed to be saying that the difference between 75% mix to the ceiling and 100% isn't a big deal. Um...yeah, it kind of is when you want it to truly sound overhead and not "sort of" overhead.
Meanwhile, I asked him why the sound mixing stages have the side surrounds 2/3 up the wall (and at Atmos cinema setups) while the home version says they need to be at ear level. He basically implied with DSP, they can sound wherever they need them to and that the difference is no big deal between that setup and your home setup.
When I then implied something about the DTS:X layout at home being flexible and the 45 degree angle shown for "heights' (not tops) was only their studio layout and NOT what they implied to be used at home, he then rather rudely says that IS *THE* official DTS:X layout and it IS always 45 degrees (utterly and totally contrary to DTS:X's own written formal position; in fact they said they wished they never released the diagram as it implies a 'fixed' layout they don't want to imply as oddly enough, moving the speaker from 45 to 30 degrees really doesn't change the effect all that much, particularly if you have a top middle or TS speaker in place to bridge the speakers). Well, yippee-ki-yay. It's OK to have studio mixing setups that don't reflect Dolby or DTS's actual recommendations for speaker layouts, but you can't move the DTS:X "height" speakers from 45 degrees to 30 degrees because some photo or diagram shows it at 45.
There are actually people there that save two sets of Audyssey settings so that when they watch DTS:X they can use the assignment as "heights" but use "tops" for Dolby Atmos. I hear no real difference here using a top middle bridge and can't imagine doing that "just in case" as it's a royal PITA. It's like trying to tell audiophiles maybe that Shakti stone isn't actually doing anything. They get livid as they can "easily" hear it (yet ask them to prove that with a DBX box and watch them start yelling).
Oh well. I'm despised by several know-it-all regulars there anyway (they just literally ignore everything I say even when it's accurate and they keep spouting the same nonsense, particularly lately about 2-in, 4-out 'rear' decoding (i.e. invert a channel, input it into a Pro Logic II decoder and extract sides and rears from the signal and invert again to get the sides back out) and with IIx yet another set the signal has to 'pass through' to get all kinds of extra rear speakers from a 5.1 output) where they don't acknowledge the issues it causes. I try to point them out and they just keep going on and on about it as if I don't exist. Well, they're possibly throwing out the out-of--phase information sometimes found in discrete 5.1 side surround channels plus you can't pan across the L/R width of the room at 'any' point like in 'true' discrete Atmos. It can only go around the back when it pans left/right as it has to pass through all the speakers to pan that direction. In other words, with Gravity (in Atmos), at 23 minutes in or thereabouts, Clooney's voice pans from the front around just behind me (through the side surrounds, not the rear surrounds) and back around to the front. It can do that because the sides are totally discretely rendered from the rears. With say 5.1 expanded to 7.1 with PLIIx, you cannot do that because it's panning through the rears when it pans left/right, not the sides (as it steers left/right panning through the rear channels along the way). That's great for getting more channels out of less, but compared to discrete panning, it's night and day WRONG and means a bird flying around the room (like in the AMAZE demo) can't just go anywhere in the room, it has to pan around the back and can't cross the room until it gets to the back (like 5.1 expanded to 7.1, which is basically EXACTLY what they're proposing doing). If you use center extraction only or even matrixed active mixer instead, it can cross anywhere in the room as a pan to the back halfway and then across would cross in-between, for example. Thus, I judged the 2-in, 4-out method flawed and unusable for Atmos/X as it defeats the ability to image anywhere in the room from a single vantage point.
I might as well not have even said a word. They just kept right on talking about how great the idea was. You can get 7.1 from 5.1 and thus use Front Wides instead without using up the extra channels that prevents DTS:X from working in all of them! Yeah, except now Clooney floats around the rear of the room instead of the center of it....
The great potential is there. I heard dinosaurs breathing and roaring above me, flying above me. When the characters were underwater, I heard the water above me. The great potential is there.
But the problem is again the human factor. These sound mixers can be inconsistent. One scene, the overhead sound is awesome. The next scene the overhead sound is nonexistent.
I love the Auro-3D demo disc as it uses dual-quad microphone recordings. It's just surreal sounding. Old fashioned panning style mixing doesn't come close, IMO. To get consistent "immersive" sound, you'd almost need to record the real environment to get it right 100% of the time. But that's just not realistic to do with movies made on fake CGI green screen stages. But if you had a trained pro that paid attention to every scene, you can do it 'right' with panning, but I'm afraid the 'old school' guys are doing in the 'old way' even with new tools (The surround is DISTRACTING notion).
I liked Groundhog Day not due to overhead sounds, but that it sounded so much more immersive than the original stereo and then 5.1 mix that did NOTHING with it. This Atmos mix showed the mixing guy was really trying to make it immersive with what he had to work with (i.e. there wasn't much overhead to use in the movie, but damn did it sound like I was outside in the outside scenes, almost to the point of actually being distracting for a comedy). Really, they should offer an old fashioned 2-channel or 5.1 channel soundtrack for that 'older method' and let Atmos/X do what it's actually designed to do, IMMERSE you in three dimensional sound instead of being hamstrung with mixing guys that think dialog is the only thing you need to hear most of the time.
