He is taking the view of the average consumer or a casual enthusiast, not the hardcore home theater nut. Atmos should not have been marketed as a solution for anything but serious home theaters. It has made entry and mid-level systems worse, not better. It has complicated hardware installation and media delivery. And it strangled the potential the tremendous potential of object-oriented audio. We could have had massive scalability and flexibility, but instead Dolby gives us almost none of that. All we get is gimmicky ceiling speakers - and even then only when the mix bothers to use them and when they are installed correctly, so I'm not even talking about bouncy speakers. Bouncy speakers are only the tip of the edge of the failure of Atmos. Atmos is a case of greed killing a budding technology that had great potential.
Shady, you are absolutely on target as usual. He is pointing out the absolute absurdity, apart from the lining of a lot of pockets, by mass marketing this technology.
An Atmos soundbar, or even a 5.1 sound bar is an absolute absurdity and not only of no benefit, but downright harmful. Bouncy speakers of all types are in the same category.
This is very complex technology, and on this forum many gloss over the complexity of it, especially its implementation.
Very few rooms are suitable, and actually probably need to be built and designed custom, to make the technology effective. I am pretty sure that for most rooms it is a downgrade. The vast majority of domestic installations should be 2.1 or 3.1 and NO more. An extra sub excepted.
I would certainly have not started down this road, if was not for the fact it was the easiest way to store my spare speakers and amps.
When I moved out of Grand Forks, I thought it would be better to upgrade my front left and right speakers, although my studio speakers were really excellent. However I wanted to work with newer speaker design models.
The home we bought needed an extensive model anyway and we needed an extra bedroom. So remodelling a massive game room, to an AV room and the extra bedroom was a no brainer.
So using my location monitor speakers as surrounds, and building my main studio monitors into the room as the rear backs was a no brainer as well. I needed a pre-pro anyway to move into AV. So my added expense was minimal. It was the easiest way to store my equipment, especially my vintage gear I was loath to part with.
So, when due to age and health it was time to move off the lake, we decided to build, mainly as a "nursing home prevention project." It is built to ADA specs. So I included an AV room to optimum dimensions. So I decided to see what the Atmos craze was about. The only new equipment I required was a pre/pro which I needed anyway, as my wife wanted and in wall system in the great room, and a system the grandchildren could use in the family room. The only other expense was four ceiling speakers at $65.00 each and fashioning four .25 cu.ft particle board boxes and four ceiling grills and some extra speaker wire and conduit. So it was done very inexpensively. The ceiling speakers are excellent. The speakers were placed to Dolby specs.
So, it is actually a state of the art 7.2.4 Atmos room done on the cheap and largely making use of what I already had.
There is little good Atmos software available but getting better. One big negative is that Dolby have hobbled Atmos streaming in a significant way, by limiting peak audio levels. If Dolby parameters are exceeded then Internet providers are required to cut the stream. So providers stay well on the side of safety in my experience.
So, if you you are going to use these streams then you need a rig with excellent and superior SNR. With all the channels this is no mean feat.
I will say that the Dolby upmixer does do an excellent job, and does realistically increase spatial sense and atmosphere.
There is very limited true Atmos material available outside of movies. I now have a total of four BD Atmos discs of musical content. As far as movies, I note the producers and mixers are timid in the extreme about putting any power in any speakers apart from the front three. I suppose they are worried about blowing up puny surround speakers. But this really limits the benefit of it all.
The Berlin Philharmonic Digital Concert Hall are blazing a trail. It was off to a rocky start as you might expect, towards the end of last season, and especially this season, they are making significant strides. Some concerts are actually impressive.
However, the question remains would I have got into this if were not for the fact that I needed somewhere to put my surplus equipment, and the answer is a resounding no!
So, the question becomes should most members contemplate getting into this technology? In my view the answer is NO. There funds pretty much always would be better used to improve their front three speakers.
