Dolby Atmos takes surround sound to the next level by delivering a 3D audio experience to its listeners. Have you ever wondered if you could get 4K for your ears? Well, think of Dolby Atmos as that. Don’t just experience 4K on screen, hear it too! Compatible with game consoles, TVs, as well as smaller devices such as laptops and phones. Dolby Atmos is fast becoming a must-have feature for movie fans, to truly experience the films that they’re watching.
What is Dolby Atmos?
Dolby Atmos is a special audio format, which was designed to bring the same immersive, 360-degree sound that you experience while you sit in a cinema to your living room. It has been around since 2012 with its first appearance on Disney’s Brave in the cinemas, and it has since gradually found its way into homes via custom installations.
Dolby Atmos has introduced home cinema serious movie fans to another dimension of surround sound by adding height elements. This gives the viewer a far more realistic impression of overhead action effects as well as subtle atmospheric and object-based locational effects. As a result, this puts the listener in their own bubble of sound, giving a more realistic sense of acoustic space that has been matched to onscreen environments.
How does it work?
Dolby Atmos is all attention to detail, no part has been missed. To achieve that realistic sound that is talked about above, the technology uses a 9.1-bed channel. The channel consists of stationary sounds, including background sound and music. A sound object could be anything from the sound of footsteps to a ball bouncing and has a specific position in a scene. Dolby Atmos lets content creators place those sounds in an exact location on the screen, setting any movement into a 3D space.
Once the audio mixing is completed, Dolby Atmos can bring cinema-quality sound to any room within your home. But you must have compatible equipment. The equipment that you go for depends on whether you go for a home cinema set-up, or whether you want a simple installation system. You could look at one of the best-selling soundbars, such as the Sonos Arc, or you could look at a surround sound set-up, such as the M&K Sound Movie 5.1 System. The optimised technology analyses all the audio data and based on the number of speakers and their placement, it will determine optimal playback in real-time. This means that when someone walks on the floor above you in your favourite movie, it will sound like an actual person is moving above you. The more speakers you have, the better the detail will be.
Dolby Atmos vs Surround Sound
The biggest difference between Dolby Atmos and traditional surround sound is the use of channels. Conventional surround sound is mostly referred to as 5.1, otherwise recognised as five speakers and one subwoofer, or 7.1, recognised as seven speakers and one subwoofer. In this set-up, you could hear an aeroplane moving from right to left or vice versa, but the surround system is unable to reproduce the sound of it flying above you. This missing locational information can take away from the overall immersion factor.
Dolby Atmos will assign the acoustical sound and space around objects to a place. Therefore, if a sound occurs in the room’s top right corner, the audio will have better dimensional accuracy, instead of being fixed to the right speaker. As a result, Atmos-compatible speakers have integrated upward-firing drivers, which gives you the added benefit of height which is achieved by bouncing the sound off the ceiling. While it’s not going to be as powerful as an actual height speaker, but it’s an effective alternative.
Can I have Dolby Atmos at Home?
Not everyone will have the space to accommodate multiple speakers placed around their living room or the finances to spend on these indulgent and often upmarket home cinema speaker packages. Luckily, for those of us who are more space conscious, the format has more recently started to be incorporated on several top-end soundbars, some of which are mentioned above.
Although the top-end soundbars are still a considerable financial outlay, these powered speaker systems achieve a one-stop surround sound experience without the need for any additional speakers or components. However, many soundbar models can be partnered with optional wireless rear speakers and subwoofers, should someone wish to expand their home cinema sound system beyond the soundbar beneath the TV.
Do I need Dolby Atmos?
As it currently stands, Dolby Atmos? Hell Yes!
