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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

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.
CamperBob2 5y ago
Dolby Atmos virtualization is said by gossip to be a few 32-tap IIR filters FIR, right? That's crazy long for an IIR filter.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  They are trying to model ~1s of total reverb time for the headphone case, so I'd consider a 32-tap FIR way too short. 32-tap IIR sounds highly numerically unstable, but appropriate to me.
bambataa 5y ago
Is there any example of a technologically superior and higher quality option winning over a cheap and simple one? (In media recording and replay, at least). This seems to happen again and again, with the cheap and simple option always winning.
- open-source-ux 5y ago
  The audio CD surpassed sales of vinyl records and cassettes. CDs arguably offer better sound (subjective I know) over vinyl and cassettes.
  - yvrev 5y ago
    I'm going out on a limb here but wouldn't CD's be both cheaper and simpler to manufacture too?
    - open-source-ux 5y ago
      You're probably correct. That means the audio CD offered cheaper manufacture and superior sound. (Vinyl lovers will dispute the superior sound claims.)
      - jerf 5y ago
        Call CD sound "more accurate". Vinyl lovers historically loved vinyl precisely because they love the particular inaccuracy it imparts. CDs are more accurate. Brutally so at times, even. Especially when they're being really, really accurate at conveying clipping brought on by the loudness wars. (Now I suspect vinyl's main purpose in life is as a marker of being a discriminating consumer who doesn't want to be a victim of the loudness war, since you can't overdrive a vinyl record in the same way for physical reasons. It is unfortunate that one must go to such measures to opt out of "music that sounds like crap because you ruined it, you stupid music companies".)
    - goosedragons 5y ago
      Not in 1982. CD players were very expensive to manufacture and buy and making discs was harder too. Over time it got cheaper because a potato could do the decoding and the lasers got cheap and economies of scale allowed it. But at first it was very expensive, discs cost like twice as much as vinyl albums. A record player is mechanically and electrically much simpler. And vinyl disks are just pressed vinyl. You can buy a toy kit to build a record player, a CD player is just too complicated.
balabaster 5y ago
If I recall rightly, this is why VHS beat out the higher quality Betamax back in the day of video tapes - it was cheaper to produce using VHS so everything was on VHS. Because everything was on VHS, that was what people bought and the higher quality Betamax lost enough market to survive. It's a shame that the higher quality product isn't always what wins and kind of says something about our Walmart approach to life.
- q-big 5y ago
  A central limitation of Betamax that is rarely mentioned is that the tapes were too short to fit very long movies on them; see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Videotape_format_war&oldid=1078484002#U.S._market https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Videotape_format_... "While VHS machines' lower retail price was eventually a major factor, the principal battleground proved to be recording time. The original Sony Betamax video recorder for the NTSC television system could record for only 60 minutes, identical to the previous U-matic format, which had been sufficient for use in television studios. JVC's VHS could manage 120 minutes, followed by RCA's entrance into the market with a 240-minute recorder using VHS. These challenges sparked a mini-war to see who could achieve the longest recording time." See also https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Betamax&oldid=1077516836#Tape_lengths https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Betamax&oldid=107...
- philistine 5y ago
  We've all collectively fallen for Sony's marketing for Betamax. It was not clearly higher quality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oJs8-I9WtA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oJs8-I9WtA
  - kuschku 5y ago
    Considering beta 2 matches VHS's LP, the quality advantages of Betamax may have simply been that beta 1 just used more tape per minute of recording time.
- cupofpython 5y ago
  popularity is expensive. people want quality, and generally arent happy to sacrifice it. but the diminishing returns hits way harder and faster for the common person than a hobbyist typically wants to accept. popularity is also skewed young. income is skewed old. VHS was a much better fit as a lowest common denominator. If a product is trying to be a popular medium, cheap is necessary. That said, once the medium is established - people will still happily pay a lot for a high quality product within the medium. iPhone popularity is a good example of this. People bought expensive VHS players with bells and whistles too.
p0larboy 5y ago
Do you have an email that I can contact you? I run a headphones magazine, Headphonesty and I will love to publish an article on this topic.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  This post is me reciting rumors about what I've heard of how things worked and how things played out. I'm not sure that I'm a good source for an article and I can't really officially confirm anything, even if I know it to be correct. Your best option is probably to email virtual interview questions to Tom Ammermann, the CEO of https://newaudiotechnology.com/ https://newaudiotechnology.com/ He's a great guy, Granny-nominated sound engineer, and has been working on 3D sound with all those technologies for a long time.
nebula8804 5y ago
And yet they get away with highway murder at the prices they charge to "experience" Atmos. Everything in this world is a rip off isn't it. Thanks for this background, it is fascinating. On a side note: I have always like how the traditional DTS tracks sounded compared to Dolby, I always thought it was just me being weird but maybe there is something to it.
- dlp211 5y ago
  I don't get this, especially on a website like HN where so many of us build software where the marginal cost approaches zero. It isn't about the cost of implementation, it is about the value added. If you don't want Atmos, don't pay for it. There are plenty of high quality sound systems that don't have Atmos compat.
  - nebula8804 5y ago
    I was referring more to Cinema(although it applies to home market as well). I want to pay for the best experience and I think a lot of people are expecting the very best when they pay $20+ for a Dolby "Premium" experience. If they don't know any better, then they think it is best money can buy. Furthermore, if there was an option for these others in the market that a consumer could easily buy then I would understand your line of reasoning but most movies are authored with Atmos and so you must buy that system if you want to take advantage of the additional content offered on your favorite movie disc. It would be nice if the film was offered in multiple formats(even on the same disc). You would think that if all this additional money would be spent, then you might as well ensure it is the very best experience. Instead as the author shows, they are still cutting corners despite charging this price. It is a scam they pull in multiple markets.
    - dlp211 5y ago
      I don't think the vast majority of movie goers are able to tell the difference between Atmos and DTS:X. It's almost certainly a case of the marginal value of going from Atmos to DTS:X doesn't make it worth the cost of going from one format to another. Consider also if there was a difference between the audio master technique for Cinema and Home, it just would increase the cost further. Atmos is pretty good, far better than what was previously readily available.
nebula8804 5y ago
Just out of curiosity: Is there some way for consumers to "open" a Atmos soundtrack and see what speakers are outputting sound? I remember seeing some tool that visualizes the speakers as the soundtrack is playing. Is it also possible to edit this and re-compile it back into a finished atmos soundtrack? I ask because I have this 2010s film that was "re-released" in atmos that has a missing sound effect in a specific scene and despite my attempts to reach out to the studio and director, I cannot seem to get ahold of them. My next thing would be to try and re-add the sound effect back into the atmos soundtrack. Is this possible?

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.

CamperBob2 5y ago

Dolby Atmos virtualization is said by gossip to be a few 32-tap IIR filters FIR, right? That's crazy long for an IIR filter.

fxtentacle 5y ago
They are trying to model ~1s of total reverb time for the headphone case, so I'd consider a 32-tap FIR way too short. 32-tap IIR sounds highly numerically unstable, but appropriate to me.

bambataa 5y ago

Is there any example of a technologically superior and higher quality option winning over a cheap and simple one? (In media recording and replay, at least). This seems to happen again and again, with the cheap and simple option always winning.

open-source-ux 5y ago
The audio CD surpassed sales of vinyl records and cassettes. CDs arguably offer better sound (subjective I know) over vinyl and cassettes.
- yvrev 5y ago
  I'm going out on a limb here but wouldn't CD's be both cheaper and simpler to manufacture too?
  - open-source-ux 5y ago
    You're probably correct. That means the audio CD offered cheaper manufacture and superior sound. (Vinyl lovers will dispute the superior sound claims.)
    - jerf 5y ago
      Call CD sound "more accurate". Vinyl lovers historically loved vinyl precisely because they love the particular inaccuracy it imparts. CDs are more accurate. Brutally so at times, even. Especially when they're being really, really accurate at conveying clipping brought on by the loudness wars. (Now I suspect vinyl's main purpose in life is as a marker of being a discriminating consumer who doesn't want to be a victim of the loudness war, since you can't overdrive a vinyl record in the same way for physical reasons. It is unfortunate that one must go to such measures to opt out of "music that sounds like crap because you ruined it, you stupid music companies".)
  - goosedragons 5y ago
    Not in 1982. CD players were very expensive to manufacture and buy and making discs was harder too. Over time it got cheaper because a potato could do the decoding and the lasers got cheap and economies of scale allowed it. But at first it was very expensive, discs cost like twice as much as vinyl albums. A record player is mechanically and electrically much simpler. And vinyl disks are just pressed vinyl. You can buy a toy kit to build a record player, a CD player is just too complicated.

balabaster 5y ago

If I recall rightly, this is why VHS beat out the higher quality Betamax back in the day of video tapes - it was cheaper to produce using VHS so everything was on VHS. Because everything was on VHS, that was what people bought and the higher quality Betamax lost enough market to survive. It's a shame that the higher quality product isn't always what wins and kind of says something about our Walmart approach to life.

q-big 5y ago
A central limitation of Betamax that is rarely mentioned is that the tapes were too short to fit very long movies on them; see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Videotape_format_war&oldid=1078484002#U.S._market https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Videotape_format_... "While VHS machines' lower retail price was eventually a major factor, the principal battleground proved to be recording time. The original Sony Betamax video recorder for the NTSC television system could record for only 60 minutes, identical to the previous U-matic format, which had been sufficient for use in television studios. JVC's VHS could manage 120 minutes, followed by RCA's entrance into the market with a 240-minute recorder using VHS. These challenges sparked a mini-war to see who could achieve the longest recording time." See also https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Betamax&oldid=1077516836#Tape_lengths https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Betamax&oldid=107...
philistine 5y ago
We've all collectively fallen for Sony's marketing for Betamax. It was not clearly higher quality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oJs8-I9WtA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oJs8-I9WtA
- kuschku 5y ago
  Considering beta 2 matches VHS's LP, the quality advantages of Betamax may have simply been that beta 1 just used more tape per minute of recording time.
cupofpython 5y ago
popularity is expensive. people want quality, and generally arent happy to sacrifice it. but the diminishing returns hits way harder and faster for the common person than a hobbyist typically wants to accept. popularity is also skewed young. income is skewed old. VHS was a much better fit as a lowest common denominator. If a product is trying to be a popular medium, cheap is necessary. That said, once the medium is established - people will still happily pay a lot for a high quality product within the medium. iPhone popularity is a good example of this. People bought expensive VHS players with bells and whistles too.

p0larboy 5y ago

Do you have an email that I can contact you? I run a headphones magazine, Headphonesty and I will love to publish an article on this topic.

fxtentacle 5y ago
This post is me reciting rumors about what I've heard of how things worked and how things played out. I'm not sure that I'm a good source for an article and I can't really officially confirm anything, even if I know it to be correct. Your best option is probably to email virtual interview questions to Tom Ammermann, the CEO of https://newaudiotechnology.com/ https://newaudiotechnology.com/ He's a great guy, Granny-nominated sound engineer, and has been working on 3D sound with all those technologies for a long time.

nebula8804 5y ago

And yet they get away with highway murder at the prices they charge to "experience" Atmos. Everything in this world is a rip off isn't it. Thanks for this background, it is fascinating. On a side note: I have always like how the traditional DTS tracks sounded compared to Dolby, I always thought it was just me being weird but maybe there is something to it.

dlp211 5y ago
I don't get this, especially on a website like HN where so many of us build software where the marginal cost approaches zero. It isn't about the cost of implementation, it is about the value added. If you don't want Atmos, don't pay for it. There are plenty of high quality sound systems that don't have Atmos compat.
- nebula8804 5y ago
  I was referring more to Cinema(although it applies to home market as well). I want to pay for the best experience and I think a lot of people are expecting the very best when they pay $20+ for a Dolby "Premium" experience. If they don't know any better, then they think it is best money can buy. Furthermore, if there was an option for these others in the market that a consumer could easily buy then I would understand your line of reasoning but most movies are authored with Atmos and so you must buy that system if you want to take advantage of the additional content offered on your favorite movie disc. It would be nice if the film was offered in multiple formats(even on the same disc). You would think that if all this additional money would be spent, then you might as well ensure it is the very best experience. Instead as the author shows, they are still cutting corners despite charging this price. It is a scam they pull in multiple markets.
  - dlp211 5y ago
    I don't think the vast majority of movie goers are able to tell the difference between Atmos and DTS:X. It's almost certainly a case of the marginal value of going from Atmos to DTS:X doesn't make it worth the cost of going from one format to another. Consider also if there was a difference between the audio master technique for Cinema and Home, it just would increase the cost further. Atmos is pretty good, far better than what was previously readily available.

nebula8804 5y ago

Just out of curiosity: Is there some way for consumers to "open" a Atmos soundtrack and see what speakers are outputting sound? I remember seeing some tool that visualizes the speakers as the soundtrack is playing. Is it also possible to edit this and re-compile it back into a finished atmos soundtrack? I ask because I have this 2010s film that was "re-released" in atmos that has a missing sound effect in a specific scene and despite my attempts to reach out to the studio and director, I cannot seem to get ahold of them. My next thing would be to try and re-add the sound effect back into the atmos soundtrack. Is this possible?