Darin, I have a question. I read that Atmos technology is being released to home cinemas. Is it possible that in the near future you can make a preset with the full 32 speakers? That would be awesome, cause I think a lot of people would like to enjoy that but can't afford it, or don't have space for them. And this way we could really have a 3D audio experience, instead of the 2D we have now.
Hi Crman,
Yes, there seems to be a lot of press lately about Dolby Atmos for the home. I am still reading up on it, but from my understanding, Atmos for home will not use anything close to 32 speakers. I can't imagine many home theaters being retrofitted or built with 32 speakers. I suppose someone will.
It's my understanding that Atmos for home will support up to 11.2 channels.
With Out Of Your Head, in theory, I can support as many channels as I want assuming the host computer has enough computing power. But on fast systems, 11 channels should not be a problem since I am doing 8 now. (The .2 of LFE isn't really that critical to have as a localized sound source.)
So, when the time comes where content and decoding software is capable of delivering decoded 11.2 channel Dolby Atmos, I hope to be able to support that. The trickiest part is finding an actual speaker system with the proper 11.2 speakers that I can measure. Worst case I could try using one speaker and repositioning that speaker at each of the positions as specified in the Atmos guidelines.
But of course, it would be huge to be able to just put on your headphones and run Out Of Your Head to get a full Dolby Atmos experience. I think if nothing else, it would give people the opportunity to hear Dolby Atmos before they went ahead and built an actual Atmos home theater system.
The truth is that most people still have 5.1 home theater systems even though 7.1 has been available for a while. Even the content is slow to incorporate even Dolby HD or DTS-MA 7.1 audio. So I think it will be a while before we see a lot of content available in Dolby Atmos for the home. Yes, there will be the first few movie releases that support it, but until there is enough content, I don't think there will be a lot of demand for Atmos capable hardware.
Hopefully Out Of Your Head will be one of the first ways most people can actually hear the Atmos enabled content.
As a side note, I did have one person who I was giving a demo of Out Of Your Head to and he exclaimed, "Wow! It's like Dolby Atmos in my headphones!"