I watched Ender's Game in Atmos (off AppleTV 4K) last night. There were some points where I didn't think much surround was going on, but others where things were flying everywhere (more towards the sides and ceiling than in the center other than some flybys which always seem to go "bass heavy" for some reason and I wonder what mixing settings they're using as it just isn't "distinct" across the ceiling. Things that are right overhead are there.
But then I watch Flatliners in Auro-3D or Atmos and voices are distinct and clear all across the ceiling everywhere in the room so I think it can't just be me using "height" speakers instead of ceiling (well the back ones are on the ceiling, but they're pretty far back in the room relative to the MLP, which is why I have top middles as well), but rather it seems like they're afraid to put things 100% to the ceiling. When you think about it, stereo only sounds so far close to you in the room, but you get depth. However, you'd never get much depth if they were mixing front plus side surrounds and pulling everything closer to you. That is what I think might be happening. These mixing guys don't want to go to 100% ceiling, so they do 75/25 or 80/20 and think that's fantastic mixing. The problem is that only pulls ceiling sounds DOWNWARD and even outward if they're using bed level sides, etc. as well. It creates "all around" atmospherics, but it doesn't put DISTINCT "objects" flat on the ceiling. If anything, I would want 100% ceiling objects recorded in such a way as to give "depth" to the image (upward depth) so thunder sounds further away than my ceiling (real storms don't start/stop at my ceiling). SOME recordings I've heard do just that. Others sound like the clouds are right over my head.
If I play a thunderstorm recording just through the upper speakers, it sounds MAGNIFICENT. Turned up, I can't hardly tell the thunder from real thunder, but that's not what I get with many movies. Binaural thunderstorms sound even better (the whole storm sounds like I'm outside) if I play it in multi-channel stereo mode (the binaural clues create the imaging locations, not the use of any given speaker; you don't even need overheads for it to sound correct, which is what I think the DTS Virtual X attempts to do to a given signal (convert it to a binaural-like output). Film mixers should be combining binaural type sound effect recordings with height and you'd get magnificent life-like sound (like the Auro-3D demos do with dual-quad recordings). Sadly, they're mostly all pot-pan effects and like I said, they don't even put them 100% to the ceiling. They keep mixing them partially to the ground (which is appropriate for low-height effects and to create a seamless transition, but things that are way up the sky should sound like they're way up in the sky, IMO).
Or maybe my system just sucks because I don't have in-ceiling speakers (I still haven't gotten to hear such a setup to compare even the Dolby/DTS demos so I can never be 100% sure; there are no Dolby Atmos commercial theaters anywhere near me and even if there were, I'd want to hear demos or other material I could easily compare.
