Quote:
Originally Posted by DDigitalGuy05 /t/1415382/dolby-atmos-theater#post_22127113
yes,why so many speakers?
For precise localization, stable imaging and smoother pans/movement. If they want a sound to come from the back left corner of the room, then it will come from exactly that direction. And no matter where you are sitting, that sound will always appear to come from that specific direction. You can't get that sort of precision and stability using large arrays of surround speakers that are tied together reproducing a single surround channel.
With a 5.1 soundtrack, you have 3 front channels, leaving only 2 surround channels. So all the speakers on one side wall of the theatre and half the speakers on the back wall are reproducing the same channel. If you want the sound to pan from left to right, it will move from one large array to another large array. You'll hear the sound go from the entire left half of the theatre to the entire right half of the theatre. Not very precise. With Atmos, the sound will go through each speaker, one by one, giving you a much better/smoother sense of movement.
Pay careful attention to the following video:
http://www.dolby.com/us/en/professional/technology/cinema/dolby-atmos-video.html
Quote:
Originally Posted by DDigitalGuy05 /t/1415382/dolby-atmos-theater#post_22127113
Aren't most films in 7.1 or 5.1 surround?.
Most films are 5.1, with a handful of 7.1 releases (mostly big movies). But Atmos doesn't deal with channels as much as it treat each sound as a spearate object, with coordinates for where that sound should be located. The Atmos processing engine will then use the nearest speaker (or combination of speakers) to reproduce the sound at the correct location. It will do that whether you have 4 speakers or 64 speakers.
There's a whole thread started a couple months ago dedicated to discussing Atmos:
http://www.avsforum.com/t/1407030/dolby-atmos-theatre-system
