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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Topic: Are we supposed to really take Dolby Vision and Atmos seriously on itoones
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Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!
Posts: 12814
From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 11-05-2018 07:34 AM
I've said it before and I'll say it again...ceiling speakers are the fools gold of cinema sound.
You don't have ears designed to pick those speakers up. The position of your head will dramatically affect how well you hear them. Now, side-to-side, that is something different. Our ears are very good at pick up those differences.
I've heard a fair number of Atmos systems now and the ceiling speakers are, by far, the least effective. Being able to locate sound more precisely behind the screen should be where they concentrate their efforts (but they don't for some reason...LC/RC are used much except for pass-through) and Left/Right Wide should be the next area of interest. Your eyes are on the screen, not the air register in the ceiling. The sound should augment what you are seeing.
As for tuning these rooms...they are more uniform than you are giving them credit for. They are done with 5-8 mics and each speaker is swept. At the end, pink noise is panned through all of the channels to show channel-to-channel consistency in their timbre. The tuning is done via the CP850 (or IMS3000). You can hand-tune one but that is a LOT of speaker to tune and how consistent are YOU versus the processor that can do any channel in seconds.
You also have a range of speaker systems in use. The quality of them varies all over the place, just like stage speakers. They may measure the same with pink noise but that only tells you one bit of the story.
And all of this still comes down to the mix. If Woody Allen were to do an Atmos release, you'd still not hear Left and Right any more than hearing any surround speakers since he puts everything in center. I've now heard some "fun" mixes where the speakers specific to Atmos were well used and would distinguish themselves from a 7.1 room. That said, about 90% of the Atmos mixes I've heard were no improvement over the 7.1 mix from my listening position.
I'm still putting Atmos into my home theatre...where the home mix will further muddy the waters.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 11-05-2018 08:48 AM
I've got an OLED TV in the living room that supports Dolby Vision and you can obviously see the difference between standard Rec.709 content. The difference between HDR10 and Dolby Vision is not easy to perceive, but Dolby Vision should support a higher "luminance per pixel" than HDR10. I don't think there is a single device or setup out right now that can do the maximum of 10k "nits" supported by the Dolby Vision specs...
Now, I suppose that any tablet and phone with a modern, high-contrast display can match the "luminance per pixel" of my OLED TV, so it's absolutely possible to get Dolby Vision support on your phone or tablet. Whether that's useful for generic consumption is something different.
As for Dolby Atmos... Even a boom box with 2 speakers could perfectly support "Dolby Atmos". Dolby Atmos currently doesn't really guarantee a minimum number of discrete output channels, so you could essentially create a single-speaker setup with it...
I agree on Steve with the Dolby Atmos Ceiling speakers, especially the number of them in your average Atmos room is just stupid crazy.
Yesterday I watched "Bohemian Rhapsody" in a newly fitted Atmos theater. There was just a single scene that came to mind, where the overhead speakers really added something to the overall experience and that was during a Second Unit scene where a 747 was approaching overhead and landing in front of you.
This effect, although somewhat impressive, could easily have been achieved with just 4 speakers instead of the 12 speakers that currently are being used in this same room. Overhead sounds are extremely hard to localize, so the only thing important is to be able to fill the room with them. In smaller rooms, a single speaker could even be sufficient.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 11-05-2018 02:22 PM
I think you can easily fix the coverage problem by having all speakers put out the same discrete channel. I don't think there is really much value in much more than a single "voice of god"-kind of channel in most conventional room designs.
The Auro 13.1 system does something similar, although they create a pretty unnecessary "Height" layer, they have just a single "top" channel.
Dolby Atmos somewhat feels like a plot to buy into unnecessary output channels and speakers. I still don't understand why there is so much focus on the ceiling, while behind the screen, where accurate positioning of sound really matters, the minimum speakers remains at 3...
Some of you might remember the short-lived "imm sound", which developed their own object based sound format for cinema and which was bought by Dolby, shortly before the release of Atmos.
Their first roll-outs featured just a hand-full of ceiling speakers, although they were of an interesting design. I found a picture of one of those setups here.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 11-05-2018 02:41 PM
The biggest problem with ceiling mounted surround speakers: stadium seated auditoriums with high ceilings. In a standard slope house ceiling surrounds would work better since would be positioned much closer to the listener.
I visited the Broken Arrow Warren Theater to watch one of the recent Mission: Impossible movies there on one of their 2 "grand infinity" screens. I don't know what they're called now since Regal gobbled up the chain. I made the mistake of getting seats on the ground level rather than paying extra to sit up in the balcony. The room had a very high ceiling and very few ceiling mounted surround cabinets up there. Couldn't hear them at all, even during the Unfold Dolby Atmos trailer. On top of that the sound was turned way the hell down. So, out of the sound you could hear, none of it was very dynamic at all. I had similar low volume issues at my last couple visits to the Moore Warren Theater.
By contrast, the Harkins Theater I mentioned had 50 surround speaker cabinets visible, including two rows of 10 speakers up in the ceiling running from the back wall to the screen. They weren't the best quality speakers money could buy, but they could be heard if you didn't sit way down close to the screen. I watched American Sniper at that theater with a group of friends and we got stuck sitting down in the bottom rows close to the screen (all thanks to certain people in the group piddling the f*** around and making us late). In that seating position it was very difficult to hear any ceiling surround activity, much less any other activity in the surround field.
Ceiling surrounds or not, Atmos can be great for the side and back wall surrounds if the theater installs the extra amplifiers needed. Surround panning effects can work a hell of a lot better. 5.1 surround in a commercial theater is really pretty lousy unless you're sitting in one of few seats where the sound between the screen and surrounds are balanced. And that's harder to do in stadium seated theaters. 7.1 makes things a little better, but you have to sit closer to the back to hear the back wall at all.
Sub-bass is typically not impressive in stadium seated theaters. I've never heard a stadium seated theater come close to matching the sound quality I heard in great standard slope houses (such as the GCC Northpark #1 in Dallas).
quote: Marcel Birgelen
Overhead sounds are extremely hard to localize, so the only thing important is to be able to fill the room with them. In smaller rooms, a single speaker could even be sufficient.
I disagree. I heard surround panning effects in Gravity which had individual ceiling, side and back wall speakers working together to deliver a really precise motion track for the audio -something that's impossible to do with a conventional 5.1 or 7.1 system. Sub-bass audio is difficult to localize in terms of direction. That's not the case for the higher frequency bands.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 11-06-2018 01:17 AM
quote: Bobby Henderson
I disagree. I heard surround panning effects in Gravity which had individual ceiling, side and back wall speakers working together to deliver a really precise motion track for the audio -something that's impossible to do with a conventional 5.1 or 7.1 system. Sub-bass audio is difficult to localize in terms of direction. That's not the case for the higher frequency bands.
Our screening room does have 4 ceiling speakers, which are all individually amplified. We've also got 4 individually amplified speakers on each side and in the back. They're all separate Atmos channels. For the size of the room, this is more than adequate.
The last year I've experimented quite a bit with the Dolby Atmos Production suite. I'm nowhere close to a professional mixer with that thing, but it's easy to test-case some scenarios if you've got a full Atmos installation at hand.
That's also how I finally got convinced that those overhead speakers aren't really adding all that much to the experience, at least not for the price you need to pay to put them in. Those speakers could be better used elsewhere, like I mentioned, behind the screen or to increase the horizontal resolution.
I'm 100% convinced that I could create an overhead panning sound illusion using just a single overhead speaker or single channel array and a high resolution, horizontal speaker array.
Although you can localize "height", the "resolution" in which you can is really pretty limited, much like sub-bass.
Your brain is also easy to fool. If you start a certain sound effect, for example sirens, at a high volume and this sound is located behind you, you will correctly locate it as being behind you. Now, if you slowly decrease the volume and then move it to the front of the room, many people will still identify it as coming from the back of the room.
One of the most impressive things I've heard in a while was IOSONO's Wave Field Synthesis. IOSONO has been gobbled up by BARCO and I haven't heard much about it since then. This needs an even denser surround array, but also in this setup, the focus is on the horizontal array.
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