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Topic: Dolby's new sound system
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Scott Jentsch
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1061
From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 05-15-2012 05:29 PM
Well, I'll take a shot at a theory and see if others can shoot prodigious amounts of holes into it...
Based on my evolving understanding of Atmos, the idea is to have the speakers installed (with the number and placement based on the possible installation parameters), and then the processor knows where each speaker/driver is located.
On the origination side, the Atmos-enabled software encodes the soundtrack as a series of objects in a virtual sphere of sound (or more likely a hemisphere if you will, at least until the next generation of Atmos places drivers in each seat cushion). Where each sound object should be in the hemisphere is then mapped to one or more speakers/drivers available in the auditorium.
Let's say there is an auditorium with speakers in their standard positions (three on the front wall, three on the right, three on the back, three on the left) above ear level. Additionally, there are three on the ceiling, an additional three on the front wall, and because there was a sale on speakers by the dozen, let's put a speaker in each upper corner.
That gives us an auditorium with 22 speakers total (not counting subs), spread throughout the room. Even though the room is rectangular, the processor can modify delay times to create a hemispherical sound environment.
My thinking is that no matter how many physical speakers are employed in the room, the processor should be able to determine which speaker needs to be used to reproduce any given sound object. If a sound is above your head and towards the screen, the front (screen) speakers may have some of the sound, as would the upper front corners, but the front center upper speaker and the frontmost ceiling center speaker would get the majority of the duty for reproducing that sound.
If you couldn't afford all those speakers right away, the system would make do with whatever you did have installed. The effectiveness is going to be limited by the number of speakers it has to play with.
Does that sound like it might hold water?
This would explain how a 5.1 soundtrack would be handled by the Atmos processor, since it knows where your speakers are and it knows what the source material is. Conversely, an ATMOS processor should be able to take an ATMOS soundtrack and mix it properly for installations that have just a standard 5.1/7.1 system. Such a configuration encourages upgrades, as adding even just a single ceiling speaker would open up quite a bit of that "sphere" of sound above the viewer (but adding more would yield greater results).
Dolby needs to get on the stick right away and put up a registry of ATMOS-equipped theaters, with some sort of rating that tells people how the theater scores on some scale (kind of like the Windows Experience Rating, but more precise). People like to compare numbers, so some sort of measurement/ranking system should be done to reward those theaters that go nuts with their investments.
ATMOS-equipped theaters should have to advertise not only which shows are ATMOS-equipped, but be required to log when the system has been checked and calibrated. The registry would be available for all to see and ATMOS-encoded movies should link to the registry web site, with the ability for people to leave comments.
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