Been deep diving Dolby Atmos for the past few months. Thanks to gear I have for testing from work, stuff hanging around from old experiments in Dolby 5.1 and the odd NFR license I've managed to cobble a system together for £46.
I've been waiting for Dolby Atmos since I was a teenager. I rememver reading an article about Hugo Zuccarelli and Holophonics when I was 18 or 19 - I think. I experimented with in-ear recording. Later I played with encoding quadrophonic mixes into Dolby Pro Logic. The Planetarium I worked in had a propretary object based system based around a 10.1 speaker system. This had to be repaired a couple of times which got me into Ambisonics as way of jury rigging a system. Plymouth University also had the vision to set aside some funds to let me put together two solid little 5.1 systems that I taught undergraduates to use.
And all this time I was trying to mix music for these formats, knowing that the there was no effective means of distributing it.
So Dolby Atmos seems to me like the right product at the right time. It's been around in Cinema for quite a while - so it's proven. It has height - so you can convert from ambisonics with losing anything. Crucially, the format isn't defined by a playback system. You mix into a notional cartesian cube - and this decoded for your playback device at the time of listening - that could be anything from a binaural headphone, strereo, 5.1, 7.1.4 etc...
My £46 has been spent on a load of KEF 'egg' speakers from the HTS2001/HTS2003 series. They're all over the place on eBay, super cheap. They have a version of KEF's concentric driver - so they're very small and really effective for localisation. Useful if your trying to put 5 or 7 of them in a small room with a low ceiling. I had an old Onkyo 7.1 AV Receiver from my 5.1 experiments. I already had a pair of Adam T7Vs and a KRK subwoofer. A Focusrite Red 16Line ties this altogether perfectly and enables me to send audio to and from the Dolby Atmos Renderer running on another machine via Dante. This additional kit is obviously way beyond £46 - but I don't own most of it. a lot of it belongs to my employer and I have it here for testing - but what better way of testing it? It's a modest set of speakers but I've spent some time with Dolby's HE-DART and REW and I've squeezed a very creditable experience out of them.
The tools integrate really well into most modern DAWs. I use Bitwig in combination with the Dolby Atmos Renderer and it works for Atmos objects with some crude mixing to the 7.1.2 bed. I'm also integrating Reaper, synced to the same Atmos LTC channel as Dolby Atmos Renderer - this is useful for Ambisonic stuff
Watched a lot of Andrew Scheps panels on YouTube. He's an amazing advocate for the format. In these two he mentions the idea of adding 10ms delay to your surround and height channels to give the impression of a bigger room. It works really well for me:
This guy has some brilliant content on immersive audio in various DAWs - he also runs a useful Discord server:
I'm listening to a lot of Atmos on Apple Music - particularly taken with these:
Had an interesting chat with Franck Martin - he's curating a plylist of modular synth music released in Dolby Atmos - even has some George Harrison on there - who knew...
