Dolby Atmos
This brings us to the present day and Dolby Atmos. Are you starting to notice a common name in all of these? Yes, Dolby Laboratories has played a huge role in advancing home theater technology over the years. Dolby Atmos is as big a jump forward, if not more, than Dolby Digital. With Dolby Digital, the engineers just basically have a front to back and left to right fader to assign sounds with. What if your room could be mapped as a three-dimensional cube and the engineer could assign sounds to appear at any exact location?
Dolby Atmos was originally designed for large commercial cinemas with up to 128 discrete channels. A typical Dolby Atmos home setup will have fewer channels but still provide you with an incredible experience. With object-based sound mapping today, engineers can literally make it sound like a fly is buzzing around your head or give you the sensation of raindrops falling on top of you. For most homes, a full-blown Dolby Atmos system will consist of the left and right speakers, the center channel, a pair of surround speakers, a pair of rear speakers, and 4 Atmos speakers.
The idea with Dolby Atmos is to surround the main seating area with speakers. The speaker layouts and positions are also different than what we strove for with Dolby Digital. With Dolby Digital, in order to add some height to the sound, the surround and rear speakers might be positioned higher or in the ceiling to add that sense of height. For Dolby Atmos, we want our surround speakers on each side of the main seats at ear level. The rear speakers ideally should also be about ear level and behind the main seats. The Atmos speakers (sometimes called height speakers) which can either be in-ceiling overhead speakers or upward-firing Dolby Elevation speakers provide the sound from above.
This layout has sound coming from all around you at ear level and from above you from the height channel Atmos speakers. You are literally sitting inside a dome of sound coming from all around you and precisely located in space by the Atmos system. When a Dolby Atmos system is properly calibrated, the immersive effect you get on a great soundtrack will put a big smile on your face!
How Many Movies and TV Shows are in Dolby Atmos?
Ever since Disney’s Brave was released in June of 2012, most major movies have been done in Dolby Atmos. You can go to the professional theater site for Dolby Atmos here if you want to geek out and see all of them as we did. Plus this does not even cover all of the TV series now being done. There are hundreds and hundreds in a list that is growing every day. With Dolby Atmos offering such a great level of immersion, it is no wonder this wonderful new format is being fully adopted by the movie and TV industry.
What Do I Need To Experience Dolby Atmos?
Many people think they need to start their home theater system completely over to get all the benefits of Dolby Atmos. You actually do not have to change that many components as you already likely own most of the key parts. You will need a source such as an Apple TV, Roku Player, Nvidia Shield, or Amazon Fire device. And that old trusty Bluray player you have had around for years is fully capable of playing back Dolby Atmos Bluray discs.
From a hardware standpoint, you will need to upgrade your home theater receiver or processor to one that can decode Dolby Atmos. For a lot of people, it’s a good time anyway as there are tons of legacy pre 4K systems out there so you can knock out two things at once by upgrading to 4K video switching and adding Dolby Atmos decoding. This link will help you explore what to look for in a home theater receiver.
Dolby Atmos does use more speakers, than Dolby Digital which means you will want to add some in-ceiling or Atmos elevation type speakers to your system. Or if you already have some surround speakers in your ceiling, those might could be repurposed for Dolby Atmos speakers. If you want to play around with options, jump over to our Home Theater Designer. You could also chat with us to explore options.