Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners ATmos

There was another thread on here with a link to a home theater YouTube that discussed Atmos and home theater design.

It also went into the description of how speaker setup and sound stage gets processed in the HT environment.

On the understanding of how Atmos is implemented inside an actual theater, the word that I got was that if you are moving to a 9 or 11 channel implementation, that you will get a far better bang for the buck putting in a front wide (9) and only 2 ceiling speakers (11) as the mixing will minimize the dead sound zone between the front and surround in any sound panning. The comment was that you will see that far more than any overhead sounds in most movies.

The other rather interesting bit was the description of how surround sound is handled. In the theater you have an array of side speakers. In 5.1 and 7.1 mixes, these arrays are handled as one so the same sound comes out of the array of lets say 5 speakers. To ones ears that is a large defuse sound. Under Atmos, there is the ability to address each of those same 5 speakers individually. That does give you either more control over a sweeping pan, or to accurately define a location, but you still need to remember the theater has 5 speakers. In your home you have ONE.

This sort of gives you a choice. Do you want that one speaker to be a large defuse sound that covers a large area, or more pinpoint accurate with large sound holes between the front and rear surround speaker coverage? Unless you are putting in multiple side surround speakers in your implementation, you will loose sound coverage to gain accuracy. That is a choice you need to make.

The Dolby spec need to be taken with a grain of salt as you look towards what will give you the sound that was intended and also you enjoy.