> Modern audio codecs/standards (Dolby Atmos, DTS:X) have moved 'beyond' individual speakers, What you're describing is representational. You still need indivi

> Modern audio codecs/standards (Dolby Atmos, DTS:X) have moved 'beyond' individual speakers, What you're describing is representational. You still need individually controlled speakers to position audio in the room according to the positional metadata. The question of representation really isn't relevant to the question I answered, nor is it to my answer, but it's an interesting topic. > Given the (x, y, x) co-ordinates of an audio signal/object, the codec algorithm figures out which speaker(s) should get what signal ...and for the signals to be distributed accordingly, you need to be able to address each speaker individually. In the domain of representing positional audio, this is also nothing new. No one mixes surround sound in terms of speakers, and that has been the case for decades. No one would manually pan a sound "carefully from the Right speaker, through the Center speaker, to the Left speaker, and on down to the Left side surround and the Left rear surround before it faded out entirely". What object-based codecs bring to the table is that the positional representation is encoded in the data stream rather than mixed down to per-speaker audio streams during production, which means that the distribution and filtering can be tailored for each setup individually.