We’ve seen numerous attempts to remedy that, with headphones like the HD800 boasting the ability to properly “image” like no other headphone on the market.
One of the greatest lamentations of headphone users throughout history has been that headphones simply can’t replicate the out-of-head experience one gets with a good speaker setup. ATMOS FOR HEADPHONESĪnd so we get to headphones.
In short, it can take the audio as specified by a movie or game’s audio engineers and interpret it to fit any given system. Atmos will then use the position of an audio cue as provided by audio engineers and do the rest of the mixing itself, sending it to the appropriate channels depending on where each speaker is located. Furthermore, when the signal is mixed down to stereo, you lose a lot of the benefits and positional specificity of surround sound.Ītmos sets itself apart by allowing audio engineers to specify a position for a sound, rather than determining its position by mixing it across channels. Simple enough, but as a result, things change ever so slightly with the position of the speakers. One of the taglines of Atmos is “freeing sound from channels.” In other words, when audio engineers mix movie soundtracks, they typically do so by assigning audio cues to channels each channel is then routed to a particular speaker. Atmos now works with Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Hulu, certain games, and others. The working philosophy with Atmos is that, with height in play, greater immersion can be achieved in movies and video games. Anecdotal accounts suggest that these soundbars work pretty well at creating the illusion that sound is coming from above you, without any need for disruptive and expensive ceiling installation. These soundbars will use upward-firing speakers – the idea is that the sound will bounce off the ceiling, creating the illusion of height. If you have ceiling-mounted speakers, this is easy enough to imagine – using a Dolby Atmos-enabled audio-video receiver, you can adapt your home system to Atmos relatively easily by routing the height channels to those ceiling-mounted speakers.Įven without those, though, it’s easy enough to use Atmos with an Atmos-enabled soundbar. Hence, rather than 5.1 or 7.1 surround, we have 7.1.2, 7.1.4, or (in some particularly outlandish cases) 22.1.10 surround. Though movie theaters (and some home theaters) aim to enhance the sense of immersiveness by placing the speakers above the audience, the sound is mixed as if those five or seven positions will be on a flat plane – no height.īy contrast, Dolby Atmos adds height channels – up to 10 of them, but more typically 2 or 4. But those five or seven positional channels would be spread across what’s essentially assumed to be a flat plane.
In this case, the major strength and innovation of Atmos is the introduction of height channels.Ī traditional surround sound system would have five or seven channels for positional audio, and one subwoofer (hence 5.1 and 7.1). Maybe you’re not like me – maybe instead you’re looking at surround sound systems for your home theater. But first… ATMOS FOR HOME SETUPSīut let’s back up for a second. Of course, I’m most interested in Atmos for Headphones.
But Atmos is pretty widely-implemented in theaters, and it’s coming quickly to home audio. It’s not the only player out there: competitor DTS:X is another similar form of surround sound. So why am I writing about Dolby Atmos? Well, Atmos is working to alleviate a lot of those problems for me as a chronic headphone listener, by embracing an “object-based” form of mixing rather than the traditional channel-based method. No surround sound for me – when I watch movies, all the surround sound audio is mixed down to stereo anyway, which often leaves things sounding flat and unnatural, not immersive in the slightest. Why? Well, in my cramped apartment in Brooklyn, any given room is far too irregularly-shaped to be made acoustically optimal, and my roommates will probably chew me out anyway if I play the weird noise music I typically listen to out loud.Īs such, I watch movies, play games, and listen to music exclusively on headphones. First things first: I’m a headphone enthusiast, not a home audio enthusiast.