14 ms·

Is the DTS vs. Dolby war effectively over?

117 points by prima-facie 5y ago

exabrial 5y ago
I have to say, Dolby Atmos in a certified theater, with a good seating position, is quite fantastic. Not sure you would get the same effect at home without a 64 speaker array and proper room treatment... but hey
naoqj 5y ago
Is Dolby Atmos that thing that comes with Windows that you enable and the sound starts sucking really bad?
- markdown 5y ago
  I think it's the company that shits on the cinema movie viewing experience by spamming before every movie.
  - urn_piqoq 5y ago
    Yeah what's up with the 20 minutes of what are basically commercials in the beginning of every cinema-shown film? We pay ticket prices to get commercials? Cinema is archaic in some ways...
    - jimmaswell 5y ago
      would you pay twice or 3x the ticket price for no commercials? I wouldn't. really, I don't mind the previews as part of the experience anyway.
- FridgeSeal 5y ago
  Possibly, but that might also be a windows/device thing because Dolby Atmos tracks I listen to on my Apple Music/iPhone sound _Amazing_
  - ascagnel_ 5y ago
    Dolby Atmos on Apple Music is an interesting case, because there are more stringent requirements for the published mix. Personally, I don't think I've noticed anything regarding the positional data, but the songs tend to sound better because they're mixed better.
- benplumley 5y ago
  This enabled itself after an update a few years ago and I thought my headphones had broken.
- dstaley 5y ago
  I believe that's Windows Sonic for Headphones.
- andrewmackrodt 5y ago
  As mentioned in another comment, Windows Sonic is the default spatial implementation provided with Windows by default. There are also paid Dolby Atmos and DTS plugins available through the Microsoft Store where licenses may be included dependent on your hardware or OEM, e.g. my Logitech Gaming Pro X includes a license for the DTS plugin. Personally I do like the Dolby Atmos plugin, I have my computer connected to a TV with sound passed via eARC to my soundbar. However, if you're consuming Film/TV with such a setup, you probably just want to enable Dolby/DTS passthrough instead.
Nursie 5y ago
> I realised there was no DTS support listed for the Panorama 3. ... > “The reason for this is that DTS is not used by any of the streaming service companies and therefore is limited to people watching DVD/Blu-ray It's kind of ironic, that after years of Sonos users asking the company "Where's the DTS on our expensive soundbars? Come on, this is an expensive set of allegedly smart kit, why aren't you doing it?", Sonos very recently released support. Right when it's on the decline.
globular-toast 5y ago
Like with many things in my lifetime I think perfection was achieved in this area at least a couple of decades ago. As the article states, nobody actually cared whether a DVD had Dolby or DTS on it. There was this perception that DTS must have been higher quality, so you'd imagine it was (and often the DTS version sounded louder due to calibration issues). Our relentless insistence on progression has led to gimmicks like Dolby Atmos. It really doesn't add much of value to anything. It's just a new logo to put on cheap plastic soundbars that will be in landfills in a decade. When you watch movies from the early days of Dolby Digital in the 80s you can tell that progress has been made since then. But watch a movie from the early 2000s and it will sound just like one today. In fact, they often sound better. Examples are Lord of the Rings, Spider-man 2 and War of the Worlds. Why can't we just be happy?
- Thlom 5y ago
  I worked in the Cinema industry when Dolby Atmos were introduced. It was a pretty big upgrade and quality assurance for each auditorium were strict. Speakers had to be installed all over the roof and more speakers had to be added all around the auditorium. So in a Cinema Atmos can be pretty great, but how you can translate this to a home theatre setting is beyond me.
  - aspenmayer 5y ago
    How were installs like this calibrated? How are home installs calibrated, for that matter? Open source solutions/recommendations especially appreciated.
    - dtx1 5y ago
      My denon receiver comes with a microphone and an integrated calibration tool
    - izacus 5y ago
      For home installs the AV Receiver driving the speakers comes with (usually a proprietary) function to calibrate based on your sitting position. I'm not sure if there's many opensource solutions - the quality of autocalibration is a big differentiating feature between AVR OEMs.
fxtentacle 5y ago
Yes, Dolby won. By being cheap to implement. I used to work in this space and I've dealt with: - Barco Auro 3D - Frauenhofer MPEG-H - Dolby Atoms - DTS:X The idea behind Auro3D is to just use a lot of discrete channels, which is great for cinemas with a static playback architecture, but there's no way to adjust the mixing based on the listener's speaker setup. So it is difficult to make sound great for home use unless you have lots of space to hang things on your ceiling. (5 top speakers needed) MPEG-H can do everything but it's difficult to configure and was fully specified very late, after Dolby Atmos was already in production. That said, this is the agreed-upon default standard for broadcast, because it supports stuff like 200 language-independent 3D objects + 5 language-dependent voice actor tracks, all positioned in 3D. MPEG-H can also be converted easily to Dolby Atmos and DTS:X. Many professionals agree that DTS:X is the best quality consumer option. It also theoretically supports quite a lot of customization. But ASIC implementations tend to freeze those because otherwise it's too expensive. And it still is expensive. Dolby Atmos virtualization is said by gossip to be a few 32-tap IIR filters with delay modules in between. That means it's by far the lowest-tech solution on the list. And that means cheap ASIC implementations. I believe this is why Atmos won. If I remember correctly, DTS:X is a $4 chip, Atmos is a $0.5 chip.
- snthd 5y ago
  What's your perspective on Ambisonics?
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    It was dead on arrival for movies, because everyone is used to working with (and tweaking) discrete channels. That's why MPEG-H and Auros were successful there, because you could just use your existing 10.1 content, add some top speakers, and call it 3D cinema. Also interference between speakers is a real thing for cinemas and you hire expensive professionals to measure your room and tweak per-speaker FIR filters. With Ambisonics, all channels are kinda correlated by default, which makes getting rid of interference more difficult. But the UE5 implementation is very promising, both performance- and quality-wise: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/native-soundfield-ambisonics-rendering-in-unreal-engine/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/native-soundfield-am... My personal opinion is that Ambisonics will be the future for games on headphones, but not gain much traction elsewhere. I mean, Dolby Atmos is "good enough" for pretty much everywhere and once you reach its limits, MPEG-H is there to cover those last weird 1% of cinema and TV usecases.
PaulKeeble 5y ago
It is somewhat amusing to me that an object based surround sound system has now become dominate after it was so big on PCs with Soundblaster and the A3D cards and was killed by 5.1 and a change in Windows DirectX to stop object based sound from being possible. Sound has really taken a big innovation step back and still isn't at the stage it was 20 years ago, most games nowadays have to use middleware to give environmental sound effects to play out of the 5.1/7.1/headphones that Windows provides, and then we have the special support for Dolby Atmos which competes poorly with the current good solutions on PC. With games DTS:X for headphones sounded a lot better than Dolby Atmos for headphones but neither compares well to the latest Soundblaster AE and Sennheiser GSX. Alas binaural and environmental sound is very much a tertiary concern for a lot of gamers so its never recovered from the Windows Vista fatal blow. Now we have the worst sounding solution developed for home theatrees that solves none of the PC gaming issues and doesn't even really do a good job with Movies either on its way to complete dominance. Its quite disappointing how the sound market has played out after all the work done by AMD for raytraced sound reflections and the early hardware implementations that did a similar thing alongside environmental effects and binaural directional sound including the vertical.
- Bancakes 5y ago
  The surround sound and HRTF on the PlayStation 5 exceeds my expectations. On the famous tech conference, they talked about calibrating the sound space relative your ears to get the best possible surround feel, but that's yet to come.
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    From what I heard, that's convolution via FFT, so in effect very long FIR filters. And yes, they should be able to fully customize things for your ears and for the headphones by pre-multiplying in the appropriate equalizer FIR filters into the 3D room impulse response.
    - Bancakes 5y ago
      I have no idea what you just said, so I upvoted.
urn_piqoq 5y ago
Growing up with the DJ/Rave experience, after being primarily interested in MUSIC, not HOME THEATER, I basically have a stereo bias and have no interest in surround-sound formats or multichannel (beyond 2) playback. I realize that this comment serves no purpose in this discussion, other than as a point of reference for a steady community that has never gone away: that which uses hi-fi playback for stereo music. The soundfield is immersive enough with stereo, and as sound has an inherent latency somewhere around 3ms/meter in 20 degree C air, I find that any large surround-sound setups are incapable of cleanly reproducing events like beats. Dialogue gets blurred, etc.
- bob1029 5y ago
  This is my position as well. I've probably had every combination of surround sound setups imaginable, but nothing beats a really good 2/2.1 setup to my ears. My takeaway has been that if 2 channels sounds crappy, you need to look at the room, not adding more damn speakers. It's just like shiny cloud tech imo.
  - criddell 5y ago
    I don't think anybody is saying stereo music sounds crappy. It sounds as good as it ever has - really great! But some of us think a good ATMOS setup sounds even better.
    - bob1029 5y ago
      The point I was trying to make is that the room is way more important than the speakers or DSP engine. You could spend 7 figures on commercial ATMOS hardware and still have a $500 setup sound better depending on the room.
      - greggsy 5y ago
        Room treatments are technically straight forward, but they come at a cost of interior design and practicality. Many people see it as but if a dark art too, so they’ll take a technical implementation any day because it has been designed to accomodate a wide range of scenarios, and takes the guesswork out.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dtx1 5y ago
This whole discussion here is somewhat weird because everyone keeps thinking about shitty soundbars and headphones. Dolby Atmos and DTS:X on a home cinema system with decent and large speakers is amazing and noticably different than simple non-object based surround systems
- k8sToGo 5y ago
  Is your username a reference to dts:x?
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  I assumed there was a good speaker setup connected to the tv in my roommates' house when I lived there. Turned out to just be a soundbar, maybe a sub too. People rail against these things but they seem great for being so compact to me.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  That is honestly the problem with “home theater”. You have to have just the right space for them. Gotta have the TV in the right space. Gotta have the right room shape to accommodate read speakers. With atoms you have to even have space for those “upper” speakers. It’s rare to have a room in a house that not has the right floor plan for such installs. If your TV goes anywhere but exactly one place it becomes very hard to install “correctly”. Somehow we’ve managed 5.1 in our apartment. I’ve seen a 6.1 properly set up. But most of the time I see fancy receivers pumping out 2.1 because their room simply doesn’t have accommodations for properly placed rear speakers. I dunno. I guess my point is that most people really don’t have the floor plan for a 5.1 setup. And for those that do, many simply have no desire to set it up. It’s still cool though!
indigodaddy 5y ago
Great article, but that was probably the worst experience I’ve ever had on mobile reading an article. Page kept sporadically reloading and jumping back to the top. Seemingly if I scrolled down in the wrong manner or clicked something it would trigger a reload or jump to the top. What a dumpster fire of a website.
flacebo 5y ago
I'm using a 2.1 system so this shouldn't affect me, but sadly it does. Lately, even very expensive TV's lack DTS codecs, so playing movies from a DLNA server is not viable anymore, unless you re-encode every audio track. I understand the reasoning, they do not have to care about playing ripped movies on their devices, but I think the $2000 price tag could probably include the DTS license.
- petepete 5y ago
  It's generally a mess. I have my TV connected to home cinema system via ARC and I need to manually change a setting in the TV to make it output the right format. The infuriating thing is that the TV _knows_ what format it's dealing with and what it can handle, because when it's showing DTS content and is set to Dolby mode the 'Dolby' is greyed out in the options but DTS is available, and vice versa.
  - highwayinthesky 5y ago
    God (e)ARC is awful. I’ve got a Sony OLED, which supports DTS:X and Atmos, and eARC, and a Samsung bar that also supports eARC, and yet neither object-based format will pass through correctly no matter what settings I tweak. Also for some bizarre reason Multichannel PCM from the PS5 gets really weird level anomalies when it’s set to 7.1, but 5.1 is fine. It does work with a Denon AVR with eARC, but unfortunately full speaker-based Atmos isn’t happening in the room I’ve got available. tl;dr eARC is terrible, whether by the nature of the standard, or by inconsistent/broken implementation of the standard
    - Glide 5y ago
      For the stuff that matters, I had to connect to my receiver then to the TV. It doesn’t help that DTS isn’t supported by my TV (LG-CX). I have a Denon AVR as well. So basically, almost everything goes through the receiver: nvidia shield, Blu-ray player. But then again, I paid through the nose for it. It makes more sense to me that the sound capable device is better at figuring out the audio stuff. Which means the ports to a sound bar/receiver is a real consideration. Haven’t figured out PC audio to my receiver though. I’ve basically given up.
Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
“The reason for this is that DTS is not used by any of the streaming service companies and therefore is limited to people watching DVD/Blu-ray connected to the TV with the audio passed through the ARC/eARC. However the vast majority of TV companies do not support this on the ARC/eARC.” What about people who watch movies that they have downloaded (or ripped from a DVD/Blu-Ray) directly on the TV? I suppose that would produce whatever audio format the DVD had without the need of ARC/eARC, right?
- gwbas1c 5y ago
  In my experience, my TV transcodes dts to whatever it wants to output.
Sporktacular 5y ago
"'Most seem to theorise that it’s this dedication to quality, resulting in file size or high bandwidth requirements that makes [DTS] far less suitable for the low-bandwidth streaming world of highly compressed and efficient audio delivery required by all streaming services.'" And there's the meat of it. Streaming has been a near inevitability and it seems DTS is >5 years too late to be thinking about bandwidth requirements.
XorNot 5y ago
Meanwhile, no model of Chromecast seems to support even playing back Netflix in 5.1.
- izacus 5y ago
  All of them support that in fact, no need to make things up. They send Dolby Digital / Dolby Digital+ (AC3/EAC3) signal via HDMI.
  - kuschku 5y ago
    They just don’t support Dolby TrueHD or 5.1 PCM
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Yes, people keep saying this. I have run several models of Chromecast with Netflix direct to receiver units, through newer HDMI cable, into my very nice splitter box which will give me 7.1 analog outputs...it doesn't work. It is specifically the Chromecast, because my Sony Blu-Ray player can do it just fine without so much BS. Near as I can tell, the Chromecasts manage to completely evade outputting anything useful and this is a well-reported problem. At this point, I have no idea what signal they imagine they send, but somehow it's never any of the rather diverse set I can receive.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      I had the same problem with a Roku. The Roku claims to support 5.1 passthrough, but in every conceivable hardware and settings page configuration it only outputs stereo for all the streaming services, even if the movie shows "5.1" on the purchase screen. This includes trying a fully HDCP and Dolby licensed AVR, or a splitter like you mentioned, etc.
    - izacus 5y ago
      > At this point, I have no idea what signal they imagine they send, but somehow it's never any of the rather diverse set I can receive. I'm pretty sure they imagine to send the signal that's specified in the specs and I mentioned - Netflix/Prime use a Dolby Digital+ (EAC3) stream which gets output from the Chromecast and your box most likely doesn't support. Not sure what your BR player can do, but it most likely doesn't send that. Complaning that Chromecast doesn't support outputting a signal in a format compatible with your other hardware is fine, but that does not mean it doesn't support 5.1 output at all.
froh 5y ago
On a tangent, wondering "but what about thx?": TIL that THX is orthogonal to the compression/transport format and is about measuring and adjusting the movie theatre audio to better and "well enough" match the recording studio characteristics.
ben7799 5y ago
I had DTS and Dolby receievers for about 15 years and no longer do, so I guess for me some of it just doesn't matter. We did surround with DVD + Blu-Ray for a while and then kind of stopped caring about it. The thing I miss the most was I had a few DTS CDs that were amazing for surround sound music experience. I have yet to hear anything out of Apple's Spatial Audio that comes anywhere close to what those DTS CDs sounded like. But DTS CDs were so ridiculously rare it was pointless.. I only had 2. I have a DTS surround copy of "What's New" by Dave Brubeck and I had a DTS surround recording of Holst's "The Planets". And I only ever had one CD player that could decode them. The DTS receivers required a DTS aware CD player to decode it and send a DTS stream. They couldn't take a raw bitstream and figure out it was DTS.
- gwbas1c 5y ago
  If you rip them to wav/flac, Kodi will decode dts properly. I also believe ffmpeg will convert them to a proper 5.1 flac/wav.
- kstrauser 5y ago
  I was on the bus this week, listening to a podcast on my AirPods Pro in “transparent” mode. I switched to some music and flipped to noise canceling mode. I’d forgotten all about turning on spacial audio, but I’ve gotta say, it was magical. The entire world went silent, except for the music coming from my phone I was holding in front of me. Even when I turned my head, the sound was coming from the phone. I had to convince myself that I wasn’t being “that guy” and listening to music on speakers in public. The only giveaway was that the sound quality was too good for that. I’m won over. The listening experience was astonishingly good. IMO it’s not a replacement for a good surround setup in your own living room, can be mind blowing when out and about.
  - greggsy 5y ago
    I had exactly the same experience and had to convince myself I was wearing headphones. This came at a time when I had no idea that the feature existed.
pinebox 5y ago
> The only real difference is that the aspect ratio of the film may change during some specific ‘Enhanced’ sections. To my mind that’s a mockery of being “as the director intended”; one must surely doubt that a director would choose to switch ratios mid-movie (unless part of the film design, a la Oliver Stone, say, or the extraordinary genre-busting Spiderman into the Spiderverse). It is not unheard of for newer films to have specific scenes that were shot in IMAX (and for those scenes to change aspect ratio accordingly when presented in an IMAX theater). One of the first search results on the topic: https://www.avforums.com/threads/aspect-ratio-changing-during-movie.1616132/ https://www.avforums.com/threads/aspect-ratio-changing-durin... Wikipedia goes more in depth on specific films and the amount of IMAX time in each: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAX#Feature_films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAX#Feature_films As shooting in IMAX is expensive and difficult, we can presume this to be the director's intent.
- hotpotamus 5y ago
  It's not just IMAX either, some directors change mid film for aesthetic reasons.
  - greggsy 5y ago
    Natural Born Killers comes to mind
mdip 5y ago
I am not in these markets and certainly don't understand the finer details, or major ones like "Xperi needs X license purchases to survive as a company", so I'm putting this out there at that level -- please correct me where I'm being naive, if you feel the need[0]. :) There's always been a pretty solid few "categories" of products in this space. There's my Mom and Dad, who purchased a sound bar for the place up north because the TV speakers were terrible and the room acoustics were so bad you couldn't understand anything said[1] and it does rain up there, sometimes. There's "I want reasonable surround sound" guys who buy higher-end sound bars/lower end all-in-one 5.1 set ups. There's the guys like me who went through the trouble of setting up the room, perfectly, and purchased a mid-range AVR, solid TV, and higher-end speakers[2], and the "Reference Folks" -- all premium, high-end, obsess about aspects beyond the speakers/devices/cables to "wall coatings, double dry-wall, sound insulation, etc, etc." There's several categories in-between those, but everyone above me absolutely cares about having that track and will pay extra for it. Depending on the set up, it wasn't (probably still isn't at some level) uncommon for folks like this to have a separate component for decoding specific audio tracks sending the decoded result of each channel separately to the amp, which did nothing but what it's name suggests. There's a world where DTS can continue to exist for these folks. They're still consumers of Blu-Ray discs, or have Plex servers with uncompressed versions of things, for the same reasons -- streaming service audio and video isn't as good. It sounds like they were already trying to position themselves as "the higher-end", which was a far better value proposition before streaming platforms took over, now that market is much more niche. I, similarly, didn't know about streaming platforms not supporting DTS. Frankly, since having kids, I pay a lot less attention to that space. I'm surprised the benefits of delivering the DTS (reasonably compressed, but DVD quality) track don't outweigh the extra size. These aren't small files and video is most of it, but I'd take a small hit there for some movies in my collection to hear the DTS audio. Adding to the file size a bit is certainly something I'd like to see; I'd probably pay a buck more a month for it if a "Premium Streaming" option were available -- well, I would have in the past. I guess the issue they face is that there's nothing particularly special about the DTS sound track these days[3]. Is there no technical benefit between DTS:X and Dolby Atmos? I sounds like DTS supports more speakers. Outside of streaming video, does it matter for gaming? It seems like if my console could output a DTS:X signal to my AVR, assuming my AVR supported it, I could setup 32 speakers (and pretend I could tell the difference between that and, say, 9), but I'm know there's people who would care if that exists. I know my Xbox S can output some compressed formats to my AVR, I'm not sure if DTS:X is among them, but there are those who would pay for that ability, delivered by software (if MS isn't doing that already). So, not taking into account whether or not Xperi could survive the smaller -- high-end only -- market or not (it's a pretty big space), having support for a better audio codec for just the uses of "discs/Plex" and non-video is going to rank higher than most of the trivialities I've seen hundreds dropped on by people in the high-end home theater/audio space[4]. Maybe that means cranking up the licensing fees, and my category of owner no longer has the next generation's DTS creation available to it. It also probably matters a lot less to me in that category because the sound quality of the DD:Atmos tracks that I've heard have all been on the great side. Once it passes a certain threshold, people in my category don't care about it -- our other equipment probably doesn't support some of the things DTS:X provides that DD:Atmos doesn't (my AVR handles 9.1 speakers in various configurations, max). [0] Kindly, preferably, I won't hold you to it. [1] It amplified deep all the way through mid-range, but just below an average woman's voice, so if soundtrack sounds, noise/effects, or a man's voice would be 10-20% louder than a woman's. We needed some dampening panels but it's a lake house, main floor -- all windows except for the one spot it makes sense to put a TV. [2] Or even "purchased speakers they had to buy one by one, separately", since most of the companies requiring you to do that at least partly because it's hard to sell integrated 7.1/5.1 sets in the $3,000+ range. [3] Maybe there never was, but the DTS tracks on some movies have bullets that fly through me whereas the DD tracks they wouldn't leave the center speaker. I've heard many, perfect DD tracks, but among my collection I have several examples where the DTS track sounds perfect and the DD track sounds like up-mixed stereo, and a small handful where the DD track is great ... provided you don't listen to the DTS track, where everything is just a little wider, particularly in the back, and it makes everything kind of "line up" better -- a guy runs past the camera and the footsteps come from behind just to the right, whereas the character goes through you on the DD side. It also seemed as though the DTS tracks engage the LFE parts. I have an old-school piston ButtKicker under my couch, we feel that, and when that part is off, it wrecks the experience of some movies for us (my favorite being sending some of the notes from a sound-track's bass guitar into LFE where it over-powers everything else going on). I have only anecdata, I'll admit, though. [4] I'm just jealous -- very happy with the sound of my own system, but I know a few people who obsess and spend a lot of money, constantly tweaking/upgrading their Home Theater space and when you hear the same movie played on their perfect system, you come home and it briefly makes your system sound like the speakers are empty soup cans connected by rope to the receiver.
debug-desperado 5y ago
DTS needs to work that Sony relationship and convince them to convert their surround format to DTS:X. Maybe even allow it for free just to keep their format alive. The current PS5 3D-audio solution is good only for headphones. They have a "virtual" height option for stereo speakers, but it released to terrible reviews. No 7.1 virtual height speakers, though that's also supposedly in the works. I'm not optimistic it will be any better. Those who invest in good audio setups don't want it either way. Give us proper 3D audio Sony, this is something Microsoft has had since 2017.
lowbloodsugar 5y ago
I’m still stuck with a 5.1 system at the moment. But no matter because streaming sucks ass. It makes no difference if it’s Dolby or DTS: streaming “Atmos” is on top of shitty compressed DD++. If I like a movie enough I’ll get it on Blu-ray. Some them have 18Mbit just for audio. If I had the cash I’d get Kaliedescape.

117 points by prima-facie 5y ago

I have to say, Dolby Atmos in a certified theater, with a good seating position, is quite fantastic. Not sure you would get the same effect at home without a 64 speaker array and proper room treatment... but hey

naoqj 5y ago

Is Dolby Atmos that thing that comes with Windows that you enable and the sound starts sucking really bad?

markdown 5y ago
I think it's the company that shits on the cinema movie viewing experience by spamming before every movie.
- urn_piqoq 5y ago
  Yeah what's up with the 20 minutes of what are basically commercials in the beginning of every cinema-shown film? We pay ticket prices to get commercials? Cinema is archaic in some ways...
  - jimmaswell 5y ago
    would you pay twice or 3x the ticket price for no commercials? I wouldn't. really, I don't mind the previews as part of the experience anyway.
FridgeSeal 5y ago
Possibly, but that might also be a windows/device thing because Dolby Atmos tracks I listen to on my Apple Music/iPhone sound _Amazing_
- ascagnel_ 5y ago
  Dolby Atmos on Apple Music is an interesting case, because there are more stringent requirements for the published mix. Personally, I don't think I've noticed anything regarding the positional data, but the songs tend to sound better because they're mixed better.
benplumley 5y ago
This enabled itself after an update a few years ago and I thought my headphones had broken.
dstaley 5y ago
I believe that's Windows Sonic for Headphones.
andrewmackrodt 5y ago
As mentioned in another comment, Windows Sonic is the default spatial implementation provided with Windows by default. There are also paid Dolby Atmos and DTS plugins available through the Microsoft Store where licenses may be included dependent on your hardware or OEM, e.g. my Logitech Gaming Pro X includes a license for the DTS plugin. Personally I do like the Dolby Atmos plugin, I have my computer connected to a TV with sound passed via eARC to my soundbar. However, if you're consuming Film/TV with such a setup, you probably just want to enable Dolby/DTS passthrough instead.

Nursie 5y ago

> I realised there was no DTS support listed for the Panorama 3. ... > “The reason for this is that DTS is not used by any of the streaming service companies and therefore is limited to people watching DVD/Blu-ray It's kind of ironic, that after years of Sonos users asking the company "Where's the DTS on our expensive soundbars? Come on, this is an expensive set of allegedly smart kit, why aren't you doing it?", Sonos very recently released support. Right when it's on the decline.

globular-toast 5y ago

Like with many things in my lifetime I think perfection was achieved in this area at least a couple of decades ago. As the article states, nobody actually cared whether a DVD had Dolby or DTS on it. There was this perception that DTS must have been higher quality, so you'd imagine it was (and often the DTS version sounded louder due to calibration issues). Our relentless insistence on progression has led to gimmicks like Dolby Atmos. It really doesn't add much of value to anything. It's just a new logo to put on cheap plastic soundbars that will be in landfills in a decade. When you watch movies from the early days of Dolby Digital in the 80s you can tell that progress has been made since then. But watch a movie from the early 2000s and it will sound just like one today. In fact, they often sound better. Examples are Lord of the Rings, Spider-man 2 and War of the Worlds. Why can't we just be happy?

Thlom 5y ago
I worked in the Cinema industry when Dolby Atmos were introduced. It was a pretty big upgrade and quality assurance for each auditorium were strict. Speakers had to be installed all over the roof and more speakers had to be added all around the auditorium. So in a Cinema Atmos can be pretty great, but how you can translate this to a home theatre setting is beyond me.
- aspenmayer 5y ago
  How were installs like this calibrated? How are home installs calibrated, for that matter? Open source solutions/recommendations especially appreciated.
  - dtx1 5y ago
    My denon receiver comes with a microphone and an integrated calibration tool
  - izacus 5y ago
    For home installs the AV Receiver driving the speakers comes with (usually a proprietary) function to calibrate based on your sitting position. I'm not sure if there's many opensource solutions - the quality of autocalibration is a big differentiating feature between AVR OEMs.

fxtentacle 5y ago

Yes, Dolby won. By being cheap to implement. I used to work in this space and I've dealt with: - Barco Auro 3D - Frauenhofer MPEG-H - Dolby Atoms - DTS:X The idea behind Auro3D is to just use a lot of discrete channels, which is great for cinemas with a static playback architecture, but there's no way to adjust the mixing based on the listener's speaker setup. So it is difficult to make sound great for home use unless you have lots of space to hang things on your ceiling. (5 top speakers needed) MPEG-H can do everything but it's difficult to configure and was fully specified very late, after Dolby Atmos was already in production. That said, this is the agreed-upon default standard for broadcast, because it supports stuff like 200 language-independent 3D objects + 5 language-dependent voice actor tracks, all positioned in 3D. MPEG-H can also be converted easily to Dolby Atmos and DTS:X. Many professionals agree that DTS:X is the best quality consumer option. It also theoretically supports quite a lot of customization. But ASIC implementations tend to freeze those because otherwise it's too expensive. And it still is expensive. Dolby Atmos virtualization is said by gossip to be a few 32-tap IIR filters with delay modules in between. That means it's by far the lowest-tech solution on the list. And that means cheap ASIC implementations. I believe this is why Atmos won. If I remember correctly, DTS:X is a $4 chip, Atmos is a $0.5 chip.

snthd 5y ago
What's your perspective on Ambisonics?
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  It was dead on arrival for movies, because everyone is used to working with (and tweaking) discrete channels. That's why MPEG-H and Auros were successful there, because you could just use your existing 10.1 content, add some top speakers, and call it 3D cinema. Also interference between speakers is a real thing for cinemas and you hire expensive professionals to measure your room and tweak per-speaker FIR filters. With Ambisonics, all channels are kinda correlated by default, which makes getting rid of interference more difficult. But the UE5 implementation is very promising, both performance- and quality-wise: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/native-soundfield-ambisonics-rendering-in-unreal-engine/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/native-soundfield-am... My personal opinion is that Ambisonics will be the future for games on headphones, but not gain much traction elsewhere. I mean, Dolby Atmos is "good enough" for pretty much everywhere and once you reach its limits, MPEG-H is there to cover those last weird 1% of cinema and TV usecases.

PaulKeeble 5y ago

It is somewhat amusing to me that an object based surround sound system has now become dominate after it was so big on PCs with Soundblaster and the A3D cards and was killed by 5.1 and a change in Windows DirectX to stop object based sound from being possible. Sound has really taken a big innovation step back and still isn't at the stage it was 20 years ago, most games nowadays have to use middleware to give environmental sound effects to play out of the 5.1/7.1/headphones that Windows provides, and then we have the special support for Dolby Atmos which competes poorly with the current good solutions on PC. With games DTS:X for headphones sounded a lot better than Dolby Atmos for headphones but neither compares well to the latest Soundblaster AE and Sennheiser GSX. Alas binaural and environmental sound is very much a tertiary concern for a lot of gamers so its never recovered from the Windows Vista fatal blow. Now we have the worst sounding solution developed for home theatrees that solves none of the PC gaming issues and doesn't even really do a good job with Movies either on its way to complete dominance. Its quite disappointing how the sound market has played out after all the work done by AMD for raytraced sound reflections and the early hardware implementations that did a similar thing alongside environmental effects and binaural directional sound including the vertical.

Bancakes 5y ago
The surround sound and HRTF on the PlayStation 5 exceeds my expectations. On the famous tech conference, they talked about calibrating the sound space relative your ears to get the best possible surround feel, but that's yet to come.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  From what I heard, that's convolution via FFT, so in effect very long FIR filters. And yes, they should be able to fully customize things for your ears and for the headphones by pre-multiplying in the appropriate equalizer FIR filters into the 3D room impulse response.
  - Bancakes 5y ago
    I have no idea what you just said, so I upvoted.

urn_piqoq 5y ago

Growing up with the DJ/Rave experience, after being primarily interested in MUSIC, not HOME THEATER, I basically have a stereo bias and have no interest in surround-sound formats or multichannel (beyond 2) playback. I realize that this comment serves no purpose in this discussion, other than as a point of reference for a steady community that has never gone away: that which uses hi-fi playback for stereo music. The soundfield is immersive enough with stereo, and as sound has an inherent latency somewhere around 3ms/meter in 20 degree C air, I find that any large surround-sound setups are incapable of cleanly reproducing events like beats. Dialogue gets blurred, etc.

bob1029 5y ago
This is my position as well. I've probably had every combination of surround sound setups imaginable, but nothing beats a really good 2/2.1 setup to my ears. My takeaway has been that if 2 channels sounds crappy, you need to look at the room, not adding more damn speakers. It's just like shiny cloud tech imo.
- criddell 5y ago
  I don't think anybody is saying stereo music sounds crappy. It sounds as good as it ever has - really great! But some of us think a good ATMOS setup sounds even better.
  - bob1029 5y ago
    The point I was trying to make is that the room is way more important than the speakers or DSP engine. You could spend 7 figures on commercial ATMOS hardware and still have a $500 setup sound better depending on the room.
    - greggsy 5y ago
      Room treatments are technically straight forward, but they come at a cost of interior design and practicality. Many people see it as but if a dark art too, so they’ll take a technical implementation any day because it has been designed to accomodate a wide range of scenarios, and takes the guesswork out.

deleted 5y ago

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dtx1 5y ago

This whole discussion here is somewhat weird because everyone keeps thinking about shitty soundbars and headphones. Dolby Atmos and DTS:X on a home cinema system with decent and large speakers is amazing and noticably different than simple non-object based surround systems

k8sToGo 5y ago
Is your username a reference to dts:x?
jimmaswell 5y ago
I assumed there was a good speaker setup connected to the tv in my roommates' house when I lived there. Turned out to just be a soundbar, maybe a sub too. People rail against these things but they seem great for being so compact to me.
spookthesunset 5y ago
That is honestly the problem with “home theater”. You have to have just the right space for them. Gotta have the TV in the right space. Gotta have the right room shape to accommodate read speakers. With atoms you have to even have space for those “upper” speakers. It’s rare to have a room in a house that not has the right floor plan for such installs. If your TV goes anywhere but exactly one place it becomes very hard to install “correctly”. Somehow we’ve managed 5.1 in our apartment. I’ve seen a 6.1 properly set up. But most of the time I see fancy receivers pumping out 2.1 because their room simply doesn’t have accommodations for properly placed rear speakers. I dunno. I guess my point is that most people really don’t have the floor plan for a 5.1 setup. And for those that do, many simply have no desire to set it up. It’s still cool though!

indigodaddy 5y ago

Great article, but that was probably the worst experience I’ve ever had on mobile reading an article. Page kept sporadically reloading and jumping back to the top. Seemingly if I scrolled down in the wrong manner or clicked something it would trigger a reload or jump to the top. What a dumpster fire of a website.

flacebo 5y ago

I'm using a 2.1 system so this shouldn't affect me, but sadly it does. Lately, even very expensive TV's lack DTS codecs, so playing movies from a DLNA server is not viable anymore, unless you re-encode every audio track. I understand the reasoning, they do not have to care about playing ripped movies on their devices, but I think the $2000 price tag could probably include the DTS license.

petepete 5y ago
It's generally a mess. I have my TV connected to home cinema system via ARC and I need to manually change a setting in the TV to make it output the right format. The infuriating thing is that the TV _knows_ what format it's dealing with and what it can handle, because when it's showing DTS content and is set to Dolby mode the 'Dolby' is greyed out in the options but DTS is available, and vice versa.
- highwayinthesky 5y ago
  God (e)ARC is awful. I’ve got a Sony OLED, which supports DTS:X and Atmos, and eARC, and a Samsung bar that also supports eARC, and yet neither object-based format will pass through correctly no matter what settings I tweak. Also for some bizarre reason Multichannel PCM from the PS5 gets really weird level anomalies when it’s set to 7.1, but 5.1 is fine. It does work with a Denon AVR with eARC, but unfortunately full speaker-based Atmos isn’t happening in the room I’ve got available. tl;dr eARC is terrible, whether by the nature of the standard, or by inconsistent/broken implementation of the standard
  - Glide 5y ago
    For the stuff that matters, I had to connect to my receiver then to the TV. It doesn’t help that DTS isn’t supported by my TV (LG-CX). I have a Denon AVR as well. So basically, almost everything goes through the receiver: nvidia shield, Blu-ray player. But then again, I paid through the nose for it. It makes more sense to me that the sound capable device is better at figuring out the audio stuff. Which means the ports to a sound bar/receiver is a real consideration. Haven’t figured out PC audio to my receiver though. I’ve basically given up.

Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago

“The reason for this is that DTS is not used by any of the streaming service companies and therefore is limited to people watching DVD/Blu-ray connected to the TV with the audio passed through the ARC/eARC. However the vast majority of TV companies do not support this on the ARC/eARC.” What about people who watch movies that they have downloaded (or ripped from a DVD/Blu-Ray) directly on the TV? I suppose that would produce whatever audio format the DVD had without the need of ARC/eARC, right?

gwbas1c 5y ago
In my experience, my TV transcodes dts to whatever it wants to output.

Sporktacular 5y ago

"'Most seem to theorise that it’s this dedication to quality, resulting in file size or high bandwidth requirements that makes [DTS] far less suitable for the low-bandwidth streaming world of highly compressed and efficient audio delivery required by all streaming services.'" And there's the meat of it. Streaming has been a near inevitability and it seems DTS is >5 years too late to be thinking about bandwidth requirements.

XorNot 5y ago

Meanwhile, no model of Chromecast seems to support even playing back Netflix in 5.1.

izacus 5y ago
All of them support that in fact, no need to make things up. They send Dolby Digital / Dolby Digital+ (AC3/EAC3) signal via HDMI.
- kuschku 5y ago
  They just don’t support Dolby TrueHD or 5.1 PCM
- XorNot 5y ago
  Yes, people keep saying this. I have run several models of Chromecast with Netflix direct to receiver units, through newer HDMI cable, into my very nice splitter box which will give me 7.1 analog outputs...it doesn't work. It is specifically the Chromecast, because my Sony Blu-Ray player can do it just fine without so much BS. Near as I can tell, the Chromecasts manage to completely evade outputting anything useful and this is a well-reported problem. At this point, I have no idea what signal they imagine they send, but somehow it's never any of the rather diverse set I can receive.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    I had the same problem with a Roku. The Roku claims to support 5.1 passthrough, but in every conceivable hardware and settings page configuration it only outputs stereo for all the streaming services, even if the movie shows "5.1" on the purchase screen. This includes trying a fully HDCP and Dolby licensed AVR, or a splitter like you mentioned, etc.
  - izacus 5y ago
    > At this point, I have no idea what signal they imagine they send, but somehow it's never any of the rather diverse set I can receive. I'm pretty sure they imagine to send the signal that's specified in the specs and I mentioned - Netflix/Prime use a Dolby Digital+ (EAC3) stream which gets output from the Chromecast and your box most likely doesn't support. Not sure what your BR player can do, but it most likely doesn't send that. Complaning that Chromecast doesn't support outputting a signal in a format compatible with your other hardware is fine, but that does not mean it doesn't support 5.1 output at all.

froh 5y ago

On a tangent, wondering "but what about thx?": TIL that THX is orthogonal to the compression/transport format and is about measuring and adjusting the movie theatre audio to better and "well enough" match the recording studio characteristics.

ben7799 5y ago

I had DTS and Dolby receievers for about 15 years and no longer do, so I guess for me some of it just doesn't matter. We did surround with DVD + Blu-Ray for a while and then kind of stopped caring about it. The thing I miss the most was I had a few DTS CDs that were amazing for surround sound music experience. I have yet to hear anything out of Apple's Spatial Audio that comes anywhere close to what those DTS CDs sounded like. But DTS CDs were so ridiculously rare it was pointless.. I only had 2. I have a DTS surround copy of "What's New" by Dave Brubeck and I had a DTS surround recording of Holst's "The Planets". And I only ever had one CD player that could decode them. The DTS receivers required a DTS aware CD player to decode it and send a DTS stream. They couldn't take a raw bitstream and figure out it was DTS.

gwbas1c 5y ago
If you rip them to wav/flac, Kodi will decode dts properly. I also believe ffmpeg will convert them to a proper 5.1 flac/wav.
kstrauser 5y ago
I was on the bus this week, listening to a podcast on my AirPods Pro in “transparent” mode. I switched to some music and flipped to noise canceling mode. I’d forgotten all about turning on spacial audio, but I’ve gotta say, it was magical. The entire world went silent, except for the music coming from my phone I was holding in front of me. Even when I turned my head, the sound was coming from the phone. I had to convince myself that I wasn’t being “that guy” and listening to music on speakers in public. The only giveaway was that the sound quality was too good for that. I’m won over. The listening experience was astonishingly good. IMO it’s not a replacement for a good surround setup in your own living room, can be mind blowing when out and about.
- greggsy 5y ago
  I had exactly the same experience and had to convince myself I was wearing headphones. This came at a time when I had no idea that the feature existed.

pinebox 5y ago

> The only real difference is that the aspect ratio of the film may change during some specific ‘Enhanced’ sections. To my mind that’s a mockery of being “as the director intended”; one must surely doubt that a director would choose to switch ratios mid-movie (unless part of the film design, a la Oliver Stone, say, or the extraordinary genre-busting Spiderman into the Spiderverse). It is not unheard of for newer films to have specific scenes that were shot in IMAX (and for those scenes to change aspect ratio accordingly when presented in an IMAX theater). One of the first search results on the topic: https://www.avforums.com/threads/aspect-ratio-changing-during-movie.1616132/ https://www.avforums.com/threads/aspect-ratio-changing-durin... Wikipedia goes more in depth on specific films and the amount of IMAX time in each: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAX#Feature_films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAX#Feature_films As shooting in IMAX is expensive and difficult, we can presume this to be the director's intent.

hotpotamus 5y ago
It's not just IMAX either, some directors change mid film for aesthetic reasons.
- greggsy 5y ago
  Natural Born Killers comes to mind

mdip 5y ago

I am not in these markets and certainly don't understand the finer details, or major ones like "Xperi needs X license purchases to survive as a company", so I'm putting this out there at that level -- please correct me where I'm being naive, if you feel the need[0]. :) There's always been a pretty solid few "categories" of products in this space. There's my Mom and Dad, who purchased a sound bar for the place up north because the TV speakers were terrible and the room acoustics were so bad you couldn't understand anything said[1] and it does rain up there, sometimes. There's "I want reasonable surround sound" guys who buy higher-end sound bars/lower end all-in-one 5.1 set ups. There's the guys like me who went through the trouble of setting up the room, perfectly, and purchased a mid-range AVR, solid TV, and higher-end speakers[2], and the "Reference Folks" -- all premium, high-end, obsess about aspects beyond the speakers/devices/cables to "wall coatings, double dry-wall, sound insulation, etc, etc." There's several categories in-between those, but everyone above me absolutely cares about having that track and will pay extra for it. Depending on the set up, it wasn't (probably still isn't at some level) uncommon for folks like this to have a separate component for decoding specific audio tracks sending the decoded result of each channel separately to the amp, which did nothing but what it's name suggests. There's a world where DTS can continue to exist for these folks. They're still consumers of Blu-Ray discs, or have Plex servers with uncompressed versions of things, for the same reasons -- streaming service audio and video isn't as good. It sounds like they were already trying to position themselves as "the higher-end", which was a far better value proposition before streaming platforms took over, now that market is much more niche. I, similarly, didn't know about streaming platforms not supporting DTS. Frankly, since having kids, I pay a lot less attention to that space. I'm surprised the benefits of delivering the DTS (reasonably compressed, but DVD quality) track don't outweigh the extra size. These aren't small files and video is most of it, but I'd take a small hit there for some movies in my collection to hear the DTS audio. Adding to the file size a bit is certainly something I'd like to see; I'd probably pay a buck more a month for it if a "Premium Streaming" option were available -- well, I would have in the past. I guess the issue they face is that there's nothing particularly special about the DTS sound track these days[3]. Is there no technical benefit between DTS:X and Dolby Atmos? I sounds like DTS supports more speakers. Outside of streaming video, does it matter for gaming? It seems like if my console could output a DTS:X signal to my AVR, assuming my AVR supported it, I could setup 32 speakers (and pretend I could tell the difference between that and, say, 9), but I'm know there's people who would care if that exists. I know my Xbox S can output some compressed formats to my AVR, I'm not sure if DTS:X is among them, but there are those who would pay for that ability, delivered by software (if MS isn't doing that already). So, not taking into account whether or not Xperi could survive the smaller -- high-end only -- market or not (it's a pretty big space), having support for a better audio codec for just the uses of "discs/Plex" and non-video is going to rank higher than most of the trivialities I've seen hundreds dropped on by people in the high-end home theater/audio space[4]. Maybe that means cranking up the licensing fees, and my category of owner no longer has the next generation's DTS creation available to it. It also probably matters a lot less to me in that category because the sound quality of the DD:Atmos tracks that I've heard have all been on the great side. Once it passes a certain threshold, people in my category don't care about it -- our other equipment probably doesn't support some of the things DTS:X provides that DD:Atmos doesn't (my AVR handles 9.1 speakers in various configurations, max). [0] Kindly, preferably, I won't hold you to it. [1] It amplified deep all the way through mid-range, but just below an average woman's voice, so if soundtrack sounds, noise/effects, or a man's voice would be 10-20% louder than a woman's. We needed some dampening panels but it's a lake house, main floor -- all windows except for the one spot it makes sense to put a TV. [2] Or even "purchased speakers they had to buy one by one, separately", since most of the companies requiring you to do that at least partly because it's hard to sell integrated 7.1/5.1 sets in the $3,000+ range. [3] Maybe there never was, but the DTS tracks on some movies have bullets that fly through me whereas the DD tracks they wouldn't leave the center speaker. I've heard many, perfect DD tracks, but among my collection I have several examples where the DTS track sounds perfect and the DD track sounds like up-mixed stereo, and a small handful where the DD track is great ... provided you don't listen to the DTS track, where everything is just a little wider, particularly in the back, and it makes everything kind of "line up" better -- a guy runs past the camera and the footsteps come from behind just to the right, whereas the character goes through you on the DD side. It also seemed as though the DTS tracks engage the LFE parts. I have an old-school piston ButtKicker under my couch, we feel that, and when that part is off, it wrecks the experience of some movies for us (my favorite being sending some of the notes from a sound-track's bass guitar into LFE where it over-powers everything else going on). I have only anecdata, I'll admit, though. [4] I'm just jealous -- very happy with the sound of my own system, but I know a few people who obsess and spend a lot of money, constantly tweaking/upgrading their Home Theater space and when you hear the same movie played on their perfect system, you come home and it briefly makes your system sound like the speakers are empty soup cans connected by rope to the receiver.

debug-desperado 5y ago

DTS needs to work that Sony relationship and convince them to convert their surround format to DTS:X. Maybe even allow it for free just to keep their format alive. The current PS5 3D-audio solution is good only for headphones. They have a "virtual" height option for stereo speakers, but it released to terrible reviews. No 7.1 virtual height speakers, though that's also supposedly in the works. I'm not optimistic it will be any better. Those who invest in good audio setups don't want it either way. Give us proper 3D audio Sony, this is something Microsoft has had since 2017.

lowbloodsugar 5y ago

I’m still stuck with a 5.1 system at the moment. But no matter because streaming sucks ass. It makes no difference if it’s Dolby or DTS: streaming “Atmos” is on top of shitty compressed DD++. If I like a movie enough I’ll get it on Blu-ray. Some them have 18Mbit just for audio. If I had the cash I’d get Kaliedescape.