Silly rabbit. Property rights and contract laws don't apply in the digital world. Control is 99/100ths of the law.

This is something I don't have enough information on -- I figure they're doing something like this, but Dolby is being somewhat vague with the branding and not really making a clear distinction.

I wonder how much this will complicate mixes though. As it is, we can spend a month doing the final mix on a big action movie, and then two months making all of the deliverables:

• 7.1 (2D and 3D)
• 7.1 home theater (2D and 3D)
• 5.1 (2D and 3D)
• 5.1 home theater (2D and 3D)
• Atmos (2D and 3D)
• Auro 13.1 (2D and 3D)
• Auro 11.1 (2D and 3D)
• IMAX (which has its own system) (2D and 3D)
• stereo
• Dolby SR (2D and 3D)
• Dolby Pro Logic 2 (2D and 3D)

All of these mixes are slightly different, mixed on appropriate speakers, and then you do a second version of most of these for the 3D, to accentuate panning effects. I guess to this we'd add to that the Atmos home theater mix.

Again, you highlight the key argument here: how is the incremental cost justifying the incremental benefit? 3D did the same thing and I doubt the theater owners ever recovered their investment.

3D doesn't actually cost theaters that much. The business model is very slick for them-- all the projection hardware is leased from Real3D (or whatever) and paid for with some percentage/per-seat formula off the top of each ticket sold. Real3D handles all the glasses, the DCP and other delivery chain items are basically the same. The downside risk to offering 3D for an exhibitor is actually quite low, the upfront costs are marginal and they're effectively guaranteed a return as long as they get butts in seats.

Actually late update- a guy on the crew of Transformers tells me they'd pan music as objects occasionally. The choir would be panned to the ceiling, among other things.

I dunno, keep an eye out and see if titles are actually released in it. I haven't seen any studios or distributors making any pledges, it could all just turn into the next BD-Live.

Better for doing this is a wavefront system, where you capture the whole wavefront of the soundwaves approaching the listener.

There is a film wavefront synthesis system: IOSONO. There were a few screens at the Mann Chinese here in LA wired for it, it sounds amazing and you get real 3D depth through the screen, but it never really caught on for business reasons. These mixes didn't use live recording either, they were multitrack, but IOSONO had a panner algorithm that could position a sound source in depth by artificially synthesizing a wavefront for it.

Dolby isn't interested in this because the theaters aren't. Dolby didn't really want to make Atmos: AMC came to them and asked them to develop a sound system that would justify a $20 ticket in AMC's premium rooms. The Atmos speaker array is the "Fuck It, We're Going to Five Blades" approach, and the theater owners make sure that all the speaker emplacements are clearly visible to the audience, so they know that they're paying for all those speakers, and Moar is Better.

This really isn't how we do music recording. I had the opportunity to work with John Eargle before he passed on, he had a bunch of Grammys and had done hundreds of classical and jazz albums, and his standard rig for live-house music recording was an 8-track recorder, with maybe 2 of those tracks set aside for spot mics -- the rest were a Decca tree or other stereo array, plus room mics. We use more spot mics for film music recording, but we do that specifically so we can reposition and alter the relationship between the soloist and ensemble, not to preserve it.

Also, nobody uses the pannable objects for music, it's just not done. The composer's scoring engineer makes a 7.1 or 9.1 and this is what you end up hearing.

This is why I suspect Dolby Atmos will never be put on a consumer format.

"Paul" is my boss.

Sure you can. Your ear has asymmetrical geometry front-to-back, your pinna, outer ear, nose and head diffract sounds as they approach your ears and apply a transfer function to the sound that varies with regard to azimuth.

Three minute videos with terrible sound and multiple opportunities for ad insertion are definitely what Google wants you to watch...

The way Atmos works is it can carry up to 128 individual audio channels. 20 of these are set aside for two discrete 9.1 mixes (mixers choice what goes in those), the remaining 108 are set aside for individual pannable objects. In the file themselves, these audio objects are full-rez and lossless; however, these objects don't "live" all the time, the mixer can use them for a few seconds here and there. Nothing as general as "all the dialogue" or "all the car sound effects" lives in the pannable objects throughout the entire project.

There are discrete sounds in the Atmos bitstream itself though, and in principle it would make remixing easier, so I suspect you'll never see an Atmos bitstream in a consumer format without DRM.

The problem with Ambisonics is it tends to favor a strong Sweet Spot, which is OK in a home theater but will fail in a large room, where people are seated to the four corners of the space. Speakers near the walls will always tend to be perceived as louder, and the further you are from the tuned center of the room, the more the sound field will appear to be warped toward the closest wall. This happens with 5.1 but the effect is mitigated by the fact that there's a center speaker behind the screen, and the mixers have individual control over speaker levels and panner divergence.

Ambisonic mixes are almost by definition not mono-compatible and don't allow the mixers to address sounds to individual speakers with unlimited panner divergence. There's always some situation where you want a sound to come from every speaker in the room, or to come from speakers on the opposite sides of the room, with equal intensity: the latter is impossible with B-format (and only possible in the limit with n channels), and the former is impossible with any theoretical pure ambisonic sound system.

and yes, you dont have enough speakers and amps for atmos at home. sound bars wont make it. hell, most people i know have their 5.1 systems setup wrong.

I'm a sound designer in Hollywood, my credits include Men in Black 3 and Zero Dark Thirty.

The main promise of ATMOS was that it wouldn't matter how many speakers you had -- a mixer could prepare a final mix in Atmos in his 60-horn room, but then when the bitstream on the DCP or Blu-Ray was decoded in the theater or home, it wouldn't matter if the end-user had a 60-speaker Atmos rig, a 9.1, a Barco Auro speaker system, a 5.1, a stereo or even a mono. The Dolby renderering algos would simply take the panned objects and automatically render the correct audio stream for each speaker, as a function of the speaker's position relative to the listener. The Dolby RMU is just a glorified OpenAL audio engine, it gets fed audio streams that have an alt/azimuth data envelope, and this envelope is transformed down to whatever speaker array the end user has.

What's even more interesting is you could have a significantly more complex speaker array than the person who mixed it -- maybe he mixed it with 32 speakers, and you have some future-ready system with 100 -- and the renderer will still do the Right Thing and expand the spatial resolution accordingly. Atmos mixes are future-proof for any simple, non-phase-related speaker array.

Regrettably, "kafoom.com" appears to already be registered.

At least it has a REST API so you can update Yammer entities with HipzZap and Plinkus. We use them with our federated QUERTOS hive at the shop, which replicates the Yammers to Wo0tgrams for iOS (or Kafoom posts on Android).

And we read them on a boat, and we read them on a goat...