CEDIA 2014 Dolby Atmos and Auro 3D Demo Experiences

[flak2]

Unfortunately, most current consumer implementations of Atmos don't know where you've placed your speakers. Dolby has relatively generous guidelines for where they should be located, and the AVRs and pre/pros assume you've followed them. This is no different from what most home entertainment equipment have always done for surrounds and rear surrounds. Yamaha's top-of-the-line receivers can measure where speakers are located, but it is not yet known publicly if that information will be used by their Atmos implementation. Hopefully we'll find out when their Atmos firmware is made available in a few days. One currently available device which is known for certain to measure speaker locations and apply the results to Atmos is the Trinnov Altitude32. Unfortunately, most people can't justify its expense. It's available in 3 configurations, 12, 24 or 32 channels, and costs about $1K/channel.

Thanks Selden,

as you say measuring the actual speaker positioning is a feature which would involve an expense that most would not justify,
on the other side positioning all those speakers in the exact required position can be difficult... don't you think that a possibility of manually dialing the actual positions would be reasonable? (if not necessary in a system that makes exact positioning more important than usual)

 

[selden]

I agree that it would be very helpful to be able to manually specify the direction from the MLP to a speaker, in addition to its distance. One can hope that this might be available in future versions of cost-effective equipment. On the other hand, since Yamaha apparently provides it in an automated form at a cost that isn't too outrageous, that might be more helpful. I've never experienced that feature in either a Yamaha or Trinnov, so I don't know how their techniques compare.