Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Disappointed with the current round of AV units

I honestly fail to understand why so many people are fixated with putting more speakers overhead with Atmos.

Atmos from what I have understood is the ability to define sound as objects and better correlate the location of sound inside the theater space. They did that by being able to address more speakers. So your surround side and rear speakers now are not just one big mass, but a whole string on individually addressed speakers that can be used to better pinpoint the sound. Yes they have given overhead sound now, but that is only a small part of what Atmos offers.

Give yourself a scene where a car is coming up a street and races past you on your left hand side. With the older 5.1 and 7.1 the sound would start in the center channel and move to left front speaker, then part of this mass of sound that is somewhere behind you. With Atmos as they can address more than 3 (or 4) speaker sets, the pan of sound will be far more realistic as it can move now through a potential 15+ speakers progressing down the side of the cinema wall giving you the feeling as if there is an actual car driving past you.

But to do that you need a whole bunch of speakers. In that example, ZERO of the ceiling speakers will get used. Perhaps a scene with a space ship shooting overhead, or in a jungle with sounds directly overhead, but the perception of that can be closely generated by side speakers as your ears aren't really good at perceiving overhead sound as they are at sounds on the same plane as they are.

So in our home, why would you need 4 speakers overhead to make sound that your perception is hard to determine where its coming from, and skimp on placing speakers where your hearing is the most accurate? I would want my speakers to best match what the capability of the cinema is and use those 4 extra speakers to put 2 more speakers on the sides, an extra one behind me and give just 1 speaker to overhead. But the systems are not really designed to accomodate that.