CEDIA REPORT POST #2
Before moving on, I should mention some of the demos material I heard.
Atmos:
Mad Max: Fury Road - opening
Gravity - mission abort
Star Wars Battlefront - upcoming PC game release
Auro3D:
Turbo - sucked into the supercharger
DTS:X:
Divergent - where she is in the tank filling with water
Dolby Atmos and DTS:X were both in a 9.2.4 setup (although, as mentioned above, they don't use "subwoofers" but large "woofer arrays"... Whatever.
Auro 3D was in an 11.1 configuration.
The 2 side surrounds on each side were tied to the same "channel" output digitally so that they filled more seats with the same information. Oddly enough, the immersive audio processing handled it just fine.
Ok, moving on.
After that awesome goodness, I walked past the Pioneer booth. I was more curious about their receiver offerings since I haven't used Pioneer Elite products since V3 of my theater. Nothing really big, but they did have this:
Bob Marley was "Jammin'" on the old vinyl. Sorry, no cassette players could be found, so this was just one of a few analog audio devices I could find.
I also listened to their Atmos demo. they were using "Atmos Enabled" upfiring speakers. After the Steinway Lyngdorf, I didn't expect much. I was really disappointed in the sound. Then they gave the price tag. Their Pioneer setup was $2000 total MSRP (receiver, speakers, and sub), and their Pioneer Elite setup was $5000 total MSRP. A far cry from the almost $325,000 MSRP Steinway Lyngdorf setup, so there was no way that it should sound that good. For the price, it wasn't bad. Just felt like going from an amazing movie experience to watching something and hearing it through a decent HTIB.
The Pioneer Atmos demo material was:
Mad Max: Fury Road - opening
Star Wars Battlefront - upcoming PC game release
747 Take Off - audio only
I then ducked into a Triad speaker demo. I don't have any pictures, but that is because most of their stuff was somewhat hidden. They did use upfiring speakers as well for their demo, and it did sound a lot better than the Pioneer setup. It had an $11,000 price tag which I believe was just for the speakers. Somehow I missed the audio processing and amplification. I want to say it was Marantz. Triad's deal is that they have a 4 day turn around on speaker orders and all speakers are build to order... Sounds familiar. They really bragged about being able to work with installers for any architectural situation. Heck, they said that this past summer, one of their resellers needed a speaker back to be cut out so that it could fit almost flush against a pipe that was discovered in a ceiling for an Atmos upgrade installation. They get the details of how much needed to be cut, etc, and built the needed speaker and had their engineers work on the crossovers and box design so that it "perfectly timbre matched the other speakers." I must have heard that 5 times in 2 minutes about how they will "perfectly timbre match" for all of their speakers in all situations. OK, maybe. I don't know.
The Triad demo was Atmos only. They played the following on their 7.4.4 system:
Star Wars Battlefront - upcoming PC game release
Amaze - (2014 Atmos demo material)
Prometheus - where they were using the laser scanning/mapping probes. This was actually a DTS 7.1 track that was "upmixed" into Atmos and sounded quite good.
