Gaslighting Your Fans w/ Dolby ATMOS™

Never expected to look at a bit of Quantum Physics in a video about Dolby Atmos.

Completely agree. Unless you're mixing for theatrical presentations, Atmos is unnecessary.

Rock headphones and binaural and ambisonics easy comparatively because it’s psychoacoustic … .. I only use 3rd to 5th order into reaper. Ambi an and b ..holophonics is fun also.. I agree with Ben here

Ambisonics is way more fun and free

As far as Dolby Atmos and the Xbox series X goes, it great if you don't mind hearing the sound a second after it happened. I thought it might be an issue with the Xbox > TV (atmos) > 10yr old 5:1 system, but it works fine if you turn Atmos off on the Xbox. I'll stick to DTS for now. Anyway, thanks for the awesome content. The money I'll save on avoiding more Atmos stuff can be put towards that $4000 arranger keyboard that I don't need, and can't play 😂

To answer your question at the end. No I probably wouldn’t. Great video!!!

I thought of "upgrading" my 5.1 because height awareness in mp fps games would be great, but nah, 5.1 works everywhere, simple as stereo, basically all half decent movies have it, all games supported it(other than subnautica) and AIMP makes all my music sound amazing on 5.1 somehow, if it was as simple as adding height speakers to a 5.1 setup it would be great, f proprietary compatibility nightmares like this

I just upgraded my studio to a 7.1.4 system, I can say for the most part I agree with the majority of your comments here. For me if I was only doing music, then I wouldn’t have taken the leap and made the investment. But I have my eyes on the film industry and perhaps gaming, so arguably makes some sense for me. But, setting up an Atmos system is not for the faint hearted. I’ll tell you the technology is not there yet, just to QC your work is a nightmare. I can’t see this thing taking off until Apple, Dolby and the rest of these gatekeepers start to fix their buggy shit, and make it better. I have to run Apple Music via Loopback just because the OS can’t see anything with more than 16 outputs, not to mention there is no real good alternatives for system wide speaker delay management. Anyway, I have hope, but if it spectacularly fails they will only have themselves to blame. It’s been years Atmos for music has been around, but still lots of issues.

Hmm, did you ever try the Psyko Audio Headset with 5 speakers in the top? Presumably someone still sells them (looks like someone bought the licence?) and I had 2 sets and loved how natural they sounded.
I say 2 sets because the build quality was terrible. But I loved how they sounded.

It's only as good as the starting media. Just like 3D screens, if they implemented it poorly, it's not going to magically be amazing.
My biggest complaint with Dolby standards in the home is that movie vocal channel tend to be only in the front channel unless they are specifically showing off the locational effects.
With a receiver capable of both Dolby and DTS, it was very noticeable that DTS did a much better job spreading the vocals between more speakers.

The most practical effect of this is when set to use Dolby standards, movies sound effects would blast out all the vocals. I'd have a movie night and no one could hear the dialog except a person on the floor really close to the tv.
I would have to modify the speaker calibration to significantly up the front speakers, but that ups all the front sounds. So Dolby sound usually isn't immersive, it's front heavy. (from movies specifically bragging about their "Dolby sound experience").
And then you go to play games, and the front speakers are set wrong. Most receivers don't have a quick button to change all your setting states, so you have to go back through and adjust each speaker output every time you play a game/listen to music vs watch a Dolby movie.

Or you could just use DTS and not have that issue. And 1 setting can intelligently expand 5.1 audio and spread stereo audio to all speakers.
With Dolby, they are so stuck on their specific settings, that you have to flip through different modes until you get the right one. Dolby 5.1 audio defaults to not using your 7.1 setup. Yes, that results in a sound experience that sounds like there are holes in the speaker layout.

PS I've tried tuned 5.1 and 7.1 back to back for gaming, and I could easily tell the difference. The 7.1 was much better for directionality and much more fluid when turning or having sound sources move around you.
I tried the vertical 3d w/ 5.1 (instead of setup as 7.1). Even special edition bluray movies usually don't even offer the vertical 3D effects, and most games sound engines aren't built expecting that either, so it was a waste vs having a 7.1 layout.

This video, while innocuous enough as a standalone YT vid
traumatized me for reasons I'm unsure if I should publicly disclose

I like Atmos.

I don't like the zoom thunk. Wizz crap that passes for surround sound. Even in cinemas it's so blatantly a gimmick.

My audio system consists of two clean articulate monitor speakers.

All my audio is stereo with one remaining bugbear to solve.

The INSANE audio level changes between action sequences and dialogue.

I remix audio tracks on some action movies simply to prove it can be made better.

Till then. Piss off with Atmosphere.

Very good review.

Did apple actually patent (spatial audio?) or did you mean trademark?
If they did patent it , you just made a pretty iron clad prior art argument that would shatter their patent.

I didn't know one can have atmos channels on music i just use it for blu rays or Netflix (and even then i have just two floorstanding speakers hooked up with bi-amp 😂)

i think an innovation that more people would be interested in would be the ability to watch a movie without having to ride the volume button on the remote so the action scenes arent too loud or the dialogue isnt too quiet. i would imagine there are more people out there that would be willing to pay for that than dolby atmos

It’s an F ing nightmare

Nice Arrested Development easter egg, lol.

I used to be into more expensive "audiophile" type music stuff but i lost interest in surviving the money and paying to choose attention to what are ultimately rather superficial things.
Time went by until i realized something: i seemed to get almost as much out of listening to music through my phone's speaker as i did through quality output equipment.
My phone doesn't have especially good sound, it's a crappy tiny speaker, not even stereo.
What i realized is that music is uniquely an emotional experience that is assembled in your brain, and as long as hearing something make you feel something, things like actual audio fidelity don't seem to loom so large.
I'd rather listen through better equipment but often it just didn't seem worth the effort to do it. To go to a certain room, or pick up headphones and plug them in while I'm cooking dinner or whatever.
I hear the sound and my brain reconstructs the message and emotional intention, and I'm getting most of the end experience.
It's almost like my brain is hearing metadata and using it to reconstruct it in high fidelity in my head. Except it doesn't really sound good, I'm just "getting the point".
It's weird

Most 5.1 and 7.1 home theater implementations I have seen put the side and rear speakers mounted 3/4 the way up the wall. The reason most people did this was to prevent bumping into them when they walked around the room, but it also gave some height for that helicopter flying onto the screen. With ATMOS, the first thing they tell you is that the "bed level" speakers must be at ear-level, and that's when I started getting suspicious. The benefit from the height channel speakers drops if your side and rear speakers are already above your listening position.

I’m setting up the cheapest Atmos system for mixing. Less than $3k total from audio interface x 2 to 14 speakers, renderer and monitoring software. Room measurement and acoustics will come later. I’m only up to 7.1 so far, but the results are as good as I’ve imagined. Most of my life I’ve wanted surround for music. So, I’m not looking to mix in Atmos for anything other than the fact that I like how it sounds.

Now the bad parts. Pro mixes on Apple Music are all over the place. Some sound amazing. Some are just stereo in the front bed with reverb in the surrounds and nothing in the center or LFE. I can listen to one song and it sounds great. Then the next has the lead vocal too loud or not loud enough. Sometimes I hear elements that are mixed too strong compared to the stereo mix I’m used to.

The consumer side is going to take time. Sound bars with up firing speakers are a joke. Mounting speakers properly is not for 98% of the population. Future car systems will be the best I can think of. The headphone binaural component Dolby just tacked on. They could make that much better. It’s not Atmos at all. Apple Spatial Audio is gimmicky. The real Atmos experience is with all the speakers.

With that said. Dolby came out with a way to connect any wireless speakers to your TV. That might help in the simplicity department. We will see. Dolby and Apple need to keep the momentum for a few more years to stabilize Atmos for music.

It would be a nice standard for mixing. The hard limit of -18LUFS is great. Panning can help keep sounds from masking as they do in stereo, requiring cuts to clashing frequencies. And most engineers have always tried to add depth to their mixes which Atmos makes possible with ease. The best part of Atmos possibly becoming the standard is its ability to fold down to older surround configurations, stereo, mono and binaural without having to do anything extra as a mixer. We are a way off even though that is already possible. It just doesn’t sound as good to use the fold down compared to making a separate stereo mix.

Sony 360RA has a much better binaural component. But it could just be that my ears hear it better than the Atmos binaural. And if somehow Sony wins this battle, I should be able to use my cheap rig and only have to invest in the $500 renderer.

I've got an old analog 5.1 set up as a virtual 7.1, the side speakers are the rear speakers, computer generates a false side channel in between, works surprisingly well. I have full 360* audio in virtually every game I play.

Did that work on Atmos at all? Did the unit have any backwards compatible options?

My local movie theater "upgraded" to atmos and the sound is at best the same amd most times worse than it was when they had THX

I think the big takeaway is that pushing these technologies with no transparency or quality control is inherently bad for consumers. I like Apple's spatial audio and it's integration into logic. For most music, it doesn't matter, but for immersive spatialized sound, it makes sense to be able to change your position in relation to it. I think this push to Atmos-ize stereo tracks is as bad as the stereoized versions of old mono records. The thing about the apple's integration (and, it's vertical monopoly) is that you can get a sense of how it's going to work for the consumer by buying relatively cheap hardware.

On an unrelated note, I have a TCL atmos soundbar (it was under 200 bucks) and while I didn't get a strong sense of height, in my small living room, I kept turning around because I convinced someone was behind me in RE4. When done well, it's kind of shocking how effective it can be. Having a 5 year old and a small living room kind of precludes me from setting up a multi-speaker system, so these atmos branded soundbars are useful, in that sense.

Anyway, I have mixed feelings about these proprietary systems for spatial audio, but ultimately I think it's convenient to be able to compile my music for spatial audio in Logic and hear it on these systems. What I think is a big problem is that there is no "atmos" player that you can load the files into. That really takes away from the great part of making music in the past two decades where you could record your music, export it and host in the same place you listen to your other music in.

Of course you can't tell front and back apart.
There is a cone of confusion.

You can tell apart left and right. But since you only have 2 sensors (ears), and you can only measure difference in distance, you can't uniquely identify the source in 2 dimensions, let alone 3. Yes, the outer ear adds distortion that could potentially help. But. That's not enough.

Sure. The brain can do a lot with turning itself and layering in other senses. But that is it. Just a lot of illusions made by your brain to keep you alive in a world of apex predators, when we WEREN'T.

thought about trying to do it in a game engine and use a bunch of audio sources around you and trying to render out the track from the in game perspective. idk if thats dumb but i think it's possible and could sound good.

There's much cheaper ways to get music to come from all around you.







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I maintain that stereo headphones provide sufficiently direct audio channels straight into the ears that binaural techniques (which don't require anything more than any bog-standard pair of headphones) are more than adequate to express any sort of spatial or immersive effect you need (no expensive licensing required). Seeking to replicate immersive/spatial audio in a room environment is of such marginal benefit and of such a high cost in space, speakers, room design, and codec/protocol compatibility that it is entirely not worth it in anything short of a high-end commercial theatre.

Enjoy your sound bar, your built-in TV speakers, your 5.1 setup, your 7.1.2 setup, your phone, your bluetooth speaker, your laptop, your vintage speakers hooked up to an old Pioneer amp/receiver connected to your TV via the vestigial analog audio jack they mostly still come with. Whatever works for you and your space is fine, and don't let some soulless corporation intent on nothing but extracting ever more value from you convince you otherwise.

Why did you buy a whole new speaker system instead of just getting a 7.2 receiver and a pair of speakers for the height channels? You had a perfectly fine existing setup that you could have upgraded for less than you spent on a subpar home-theater-in-a-box and had real height channel speakers. No one who has an existing 5.1 system should be going out and buying a whole 7.2 kit, just upgrade the receiver and get a pair of Polks and mount them up, worked just fine for me.

Thanks for helping to reduce all the ATMOS... (wait for it) ...fear! Great video.

I loved this video, and wanted to throw in my own experience...
I tried listening to a recent album from a band ("Nothing More") that was supposedly mastered for Atmos.
I was listening on a Windows laptop, using iTunes, and I was using Sony WH-1000XM4 (big over the ear noise canceling cans).

it sounded like total garbage. I changed the settings on iTunes to just use Lossless instead of Atmos... sounded 10x better.

I haven't gone back and tried the album again using an iPhone + AirPods Pro to see if the "Atmos" sounded any better that way... but I can say with certainty that if your software picks the wrong "mix" and you don't have Atmos-compatible output, it definitely comes out like dog poop.

Just bought a samsung hwq990b and paid over half what it cost brand new. Atmos adds another dimension. I like it. You always have the option to listen to your favourite tunes in good old stereo. Compliments my Samsung TV nicely. Great video btw. I'm not one for jumping in with anything new but prefer to play the waiting game which means a lower price and a chance to see if theirs any bad feedback.

Hi Benn. I'm a relatively recent subscriber but I was curious what your opinion on Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree is - specifically his feelings about music production and and how people listen to music nowadays.

Sony just added Atmos to the Playstation so they can use it to sneak some more audio hardware onto your tab. I have been linking peeps to this video.

I listen majority of music with 7.1 system always in surround mode (actually have 3 subwoofers, frequency response starts from 10 Hz up). I about never listen in stereo mode in the living room, because I have equal soundfield with identical speakers in the front stage and also side surrounds are similar because they too are Genelecs. I produce spatial tricks on my own music but only in stereo because in the home studio I still don't have full Atmos setup for monitoring. Plus Soundcloud does not support Atmos, waits for the day that I start to release on Apple Music, which I definitely will once my music reaches state "finished enough" for that. I listen even stereo content in 7.1 mode as most music I listen to, work fine through DTS:X decoding to multiple channels including side surrounds (DTS:X seems to decode them bettter for music than Dolby Surround). I am going to have 7.1.4 system eventually but it is still waiting for cable installations to the ceiling, and that is a todo because have had many other things to do. The additional side surrounds made very big difference vs. 5.1 that I was listening before, don't expect the ceiling channels to make as big difference as the side surrounds did, so that's why it hasn't been that much of a hurry.

Anyway, multiple channels/object based audio for music is amazing, especially in electronic music which does not have any limitations on sound stage, but the musician can create it in the way the spatial approach of the tune is trying to communicate. Acoustic music would have more limitations with mostly putting ambience to the other channels than front stage. But in electronic music, the immersion really can take listener to a different galaxy, and that is the intention really, sadly very few artists utilise this opportunity today. I want to utilise it myself, despite I am a small artist that wont be a professional musician probably ever, doing it just for fun.

I am listening music through Apple Music and can listen everything in surround with subwoofers. I would not imagine trading speaker quality to their amount, so budget levels you was talking about in the video are for a speaker in each channel, not budget for all channels, unrealistic to have good system with just like 2000. One Genelec costs pretty much 2000 or more and there is a need to have a lot of them in the 7.1.4 system. Completely different experience when there are seriously good speakers in all channels.

Multiple channels and spatial directions with electronic music can deliver completely different emotion and intention than if that music would be coming from only from the front. But it needs to be designed that way and it is not something that can be retrofitted to old albums. I do surround pannings with actual intention and that is not random I have chosen it the way I have done it. Currently available Atmos mixes in the Apple Music tend to suck, but once I get my Atmos mixing capability gets implemented, would like to deliver something that literally takes listeners to an another world. I am not a professional musician and have no intentions to get monetary gains from it, and all of this is just for creating experiences to others, not and is not limited to what has the most commercial value. Also in my mixes, I wont serve average people, the music is full range and full dynamic range. Most people nowadays listen with headphones if they don't happen to have full audio system, and (mediocre) headphones (already) have full range and full dynamic range capability, including Apple Airpods.

You only need two speakers (headphones) to get immersive audio if you use binaural audio 😂 If the recording is done like that it is amazing 😃

You only have two ears. Put on a pair of headphones and call it a day.

I would love to see an Atmos chat with you and Steven Wilson. That would be fun. I wonder how his music sounds in Atmos?

I want to hear King Gizzard in Atmos....but it doesn't exist and I'm cheap and not rich. So there.

Protect this man at all costs. Thankyou Benn. The technology, though "sounds" awesome, needs a lot more in terms of implementation. Mixing Audio in Atmos is not something I am looking forward to anymore. maybe a 5 to 8 years down the line? Sure.

Thank you for this video, I agree 100%!

Just so you know, the last time I checked, Amazon music only supports Atmos in the binaural format for headphone/earbud use. So if you setup a multi-speaker setup in your house to enjoy Atmos you should go the way of Apple Music or Tidal.

Thanks for your unsalted, non sugar and much needed pushback rant to “ chokepointcapitalism” ( good t-shirt) , seems like we live in a world with solutions for never emerging first world problems..
influenza’s uh sorry influencers ,..take notes ;)

DTS always seemed like a better version of Dolby anyway, through all the years, but with way less marketing budget and hype. Though the companies often produce codecs that are close enough in features that it usually doesn't matter, and for sure consumers can't just decide what they're buying; just at the whim of whatever the producer has licensed. DTS-HD MA and Dolby TrueHD are both lossless channel-based codecs with built-in backwards compatibility for old equipment that only supports older DTS and Dolby specs (and DTS-X and Dolby Atmos are much the same: you can play them off older equipment that only knows DTS-HD MA/Dolby TrueHD...). DTS-HD MA has better support for engineering downmix coefficients right in the codec; you don't have to rely on some generic 7.1→5.1 or 5.1→stereo/7.1→stereo conversion, you can actually engineer the stereo downmix into the codec. AFAIK Dolby TrueHD doesn't offer it.

I'm not really surprised to hear that DTS-X has a likewise technical superiority over Dolby Atmos, but big bucks are going to speak a lot more than some minor features.

I like you Benn. You're cool and you have some strong points, but honestly, it wasn't that hard? I bought some beats fit, pay the normal apple subscription and it just works. Apple also have tonnes of music for atmos, and it works great. Now, it's of course not real atmos in my buds, but listening to classical music, or, the Daft Punk album mixed with surround in mind, it kind of does make a difference. But the Stereo to fake spatial audio, yeah, it's crap.

But yeah, most people listen to music on crappy speakers and don't really care for anything else than creating some noice to kill the oh so, in my eyes (ears) preferable silence that could otherwise be offered.

Thumbs up for great material as always ;)

@Benn Jorden
Heya. You might wanne take a look at Dolby Atmos Composer when it comes to the pricepoint :)

But I do agree. There are view mixes that actually use atmos well

Well thank God I'm too poor to give a shit about dolby atmos.