IMAX Laser vs Dolby Cinema

[Randy Stankey]

I frequently find the sound to be thin and metallic sounding and I find that the mixes frequently don't make great use of the Atmos capability.

That's because Atmos is digital. Everybody knows that anything digital is supposed to sound "digital-ey."
How are people supposed to know that it's digital if it doesn't sound digital-ey?

[Marcel Birgelen]

I have absolutely NEVER been in an Atmos auditorium where the audio level was too low. Quite the opposite. In fact, that's true for every theater I've been in, regardless of presentation format. Sometimes I bring a sound meter with me just to see how freaking loud it is.
However, even though I believe that theoretically, Atmos should be superior, at least in the Dolby Cinema auditoriums that I attend, I frequently find the sound to be thin and metallic sounding and I find that the mixes frequently don't make great use of the Atmos capability. Sometimes, the 5.1/7.1 auditoriums actually sound better with a fuller, warmer, crisper, resonant sound.

A lot of Atmos setups are designed to be "Atmos in name only". The irony is, even the most minimalistic Atmos setup isn't cheap and you can better put your money into a very good 7.1 setup than a borderline Atmos setup. The problem here is the marketing. Atmos has some "marquee value" while "7.1 surround sound" does not.

Many Atmos mixes are lackluster mixes. They're essentially just the static 5.1 or 7.1 mix with some auxiliary sounds moved into objects, only to be able to slap the Atmos or "Immersive Sound" badge on it.

The last Atmos... ahum... Immersive Sound mix that really impressed me was Ambulance, 2022. The money his Bayness didn't spend on explosions apparently went into the sound mix, which was really "immersive" (that word again) and gave all the speakers in the room a good workout, yeah, even those overhead speakers got some time to blow off some dust...

[Martin Brooks]

A lot of Atmos setups are designed to be "Atmos in name only". The irony is, even the most minimalistic Atmos setup isn't cheap and you can better put your money into a very good 7.1 setup than a borderline Atmos setup. The problem here is the marketing. Atmos has some "marquee value" while "7.1 surround sound" does not.

Many Atmos mixes are lackluster mixes. They're essentially just the static 5.1 or 7.1 mix with some auxiliary sounds moved into objects, only to be able to slap the Atmos or "Immersive Sound" badge on it.

The last Atmos... ahum... Immersive Sound mix that really impressed me was Ambulance, 2022. The money his Bayness didn't spend on explosions apparently went into the sound mix, which was really "immersive" (that word again) and gave all the speakers in the room a good workout, yeah, even those overhead speakers got some time to blow off some dust...

The theaters I attend have full Dolby Cinema Atmos capability: full stage, surround and height arrays and separate surround bass bins mounted on the ceilings. So that's not the issue. I just think the quality of the amps and speakers isn't that great, although I don't know what they are.
But I agree that some Atmos mixes are 5.1 or 7.1 with just some objects to sweeten the mix, although I think that was more true in the early days. Because when they mix, they can mix the 5.1/7.1 first and then sweeten with objects or they can mix in Atmos and then auto-generate the 7.1 and 5.1 and correct as necessary. In the early days, they tended to mix 5.1/7.1 and sweeten because that's what the mixers were used to.

I remember when I saw that "Legend of Tarzan" movie (2016), I thought there was so much opportunity to have the sounds of the jungle come from all around in multichannel and have rain come from above (since the trees are tall and you'd hear the sound of rain hitting the leaves). But that wasn't what I heard. The most recent film I saw in Dolby was "Dune 2" and while the mix was appropriate, I didn't think it was mind-blowing.

And yet when I saw a film that didn't necessarily require a great mix, "Dumb Money" (in a regular 7.1 auditorium), the sound quality was fantastic. Same for "The French Dispatch" and "Belfast" in 2021. Warm, crisp, lots of presence, great sounding score, plenty of perceived separation.

One of the theaters where I find the sound is the best is a small arthouse that largely presents vintage films, most of which are mono: The Film Forum on Houston Street in NYC. I'm always amazed how good the sound is there.

[Martin Brooks]

That's because Atmos is digital. Everybody knows that anything digital is supposed to sound "digital-ey."
How are people supposed to know that it's digital if it doesn't sound digital-ey?

I know you're half-joking, but I've always felt that the negative sound qualities that people associate with digital isn't because it's digital. It's because of the electronics (and speakers) used today. Tube amplifiers simply sounded better, even though they generally had higher distortion levels (but we love that type of harmonic distortion, which generates square waves.) At home, I was very disappointed with the sound of my A/V receiver when playing music (it was good enough for movies/TV). I re-installed my former system for analog and CD listening and built an amp switch to switch between the amps feeding the front Left and Right speakers. And then I replaced that power amp with a re-creation of the Dynaco 70 tube power amp. When I bought the amp, I was sure that I really wasn't going to hear a difference and that I would have to return it or sell it, but the difference was mind-blowing. It's only 35 watts per channel, but it sounds far better and far more powerful than the amps in the A/V receiver. There's a few local producers who come to me to listen to their mixes because they trust my system more than playback at the recording studio.
Furthermore, I still have an Alesis CD standalone CD recorder that was designed for recording studios. If I copy a vinyl LP to it and playback the LP and the CD in sync and switch between them, no one has ever been able to perceive the difference and I've probably run that test on 50 different people. If digital destroyed the analog quality, listeners should have been able to perceive a difference. The other interesting thing about it is that one can record at a higher quality level than RedBook 44.1/16. You can record at 48/88.2/96 kHz sampling rate and at 20 or 24 bit (but obviously they won't play on a standard CD player). Maybe I'm too old and my high frequency hearing is too far gone, but I couldn't perceive any difference, even recording live instead of from an LP.

When "The Right Stuff" was issued on Blu-ray, the first release was improperly released with a 48Khz track instead of a 96Khz track and if you notified the distributor, they sent a replacement disc. I was all excited to get the replacement. Couldn't perceive any difference. And since I kept both discs, to this day, I can't tell which is which. (I suppose there's some app that will tell me the sampling rate on the primary audio track.)

I've never heard today's home speakers sound as good as Acoustic Research and Advent speakers did back in the day. I'm still using DCM Time Windows that I bought in 1980, for the front Left and Right because I've never heard anything better since that was affordable. Some years ago, I mail ordered some allegedly high end floor speakers and they sounded so dull, I returned them.

[Randy Stankey]

It has a lot to do with the listener's expectations. People want to hear things like they expect them to sound. For some reason, people think that, because digital sound is somehow supposed to be better, they "need" to hear some difference that confirms their expectations.

To me, a traditional analogue recording sounds "smoother" while many digital recordings sound "sharper." You can make, either digital or analogue, sound sharp or smooth depending on how you make the recording but most people expect things to sound one way or the other.

For me, it's not about the technology, it's about the music. If I'm listening to Mel Torme, I want that Velvet Fog! Smooth, baby, smooth! If I'm listening to Tijuana Brass, I want to hear trumpets sound so sharp you could shave with them! Whether it's digital or analogue, to me, it makes little difference.