Apple Joining the Atmos streaming game!

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Thank you for that. It will be very useful, to someone like me ! :)

I’m going to leave Dolby vision settings alone, just for now. ;)
Just keep in mind when you set it to have Dolby Vision on all the time it “forces” the content into DV which could cause some of the issues your experience. By selecting match rate, etc, ATV4K automatically plays content according to the encoding…so if it’s HDR10 it plays HDR10, etc.
 
Just keep in mind when you set it to have Dolby Vision on all the time it “forces” the content into DV which could cause some of the issues your experience. By selecting match rate, etc, ATV4K automatically plays content according to the encoding…so if it’s HDR10 it plays HDR10, etc.

Thanks for that. I’ll have a look at the settings sometime tomorrow.
 
I’ve just sorted out wired headphone use, connected to my Sony TA-ZH1ES, ( With my Sony MDR-Z1R’s headphones )

I just briefly tried my favourite artist, Michael Jackson, didn’t listen to a whole song & thought I’d go back to the Yello album, which was displaying PCM48kHz, as it should.

…..but DSD Remastering enabled…..& OMG !!!!!!! :LB:SG:SB:cool:
 
Do you have an Atmos system? If not, the offerings on Apple Music (mostly, if not all, commissioned by Dolby and not Apple) are not going to compare to a typical 5.1 mix. When listening in 5.1 without heights, the instruments that would ordinarily be subtracted out of the L-C-R-LS-RS and added to the height speakers are instead mixed in leading to a lack of separation. A better comparison would be the Bluray of the Atmos version of REM's Automatic for the People compared to the Apple Music version, which should be the same other than the compression. Neither will sound like the previous Elliot Scheiner 5.1 mix.

If you are saying a quality Atmos mix can't ever sound as good as an excellent 5.1 mix, on a 5.1 setup, I would say that isn't my experience.
 
If you are saying a quality Atmos mix can't ever sound as good as an excellent 5.1 mix, on a 5.1 setup, I would say that isn't my experience.

It's very much going to depend on the authoring. I don't believe there's any technical reason an Atmos mix can't be authored such that its 7.1 bed is fully tuned, and really is a "dedicated 7.1 mix". There's no technical reason to release separate Atmos and 7.1 mixes - if you tune a 7.1 mix, it can be in the Atmos track. And then I personally think there's no point making separate 7.1 and 5.1. Player 7.1->5.1 downmix is fine, IMO.

It's more just a question of effort - making the Atmos mix takes time, and there's the 2-channel mix to do too. How much time will they want to spend optimising the 7.1? There will be a temptation to just auto-downmix, which can lead to the loss of stem isolation described, which is contrary to many people's taste. (I'm personally more about the spatial aspect than the isolation, so I think it would bug me less).

But even with auto-downmix, I think we 7.1 users potentially win. Music has tended to stick with 5.1, but Atmos always gives us 7.1. We get a bit more surround separation.

Although I'm not clear how much easy control Dolby give on the auto-downmix. It may be that there is a simple knob which favours horizontal spread. Kind of a "top->7.1 downmix width" control.

I think some people are envisaging an overhead pan from L->Ltf->Rtr->Rrs to be mapped linearly from L->Rrs in the downmix, so stuff that was deliberately isolated towards Ltf always ends up somewhere mid-front-left and coming out of multiple speakers

But for music rather than films, where spatial relation to picture is not the aim, the geometry could be stretched so that effectively Ltf is downmixed to L, remaining isolated, Rtr to Rrs, and only stuff between Ltf and Rtr goes into the midfield.

(Is that how Auro-3D works? Collapsing each height into its corresponding base channel? In which case Atmos could certainly have provided that control to imitate it...)
 
It's very much going to depend on the authoring. I don't believe there's any technical reason an Atmos mix can't be authored such that its 7.1 bed is fully tuned, and really is a "dedicated 7.1 mix". There's no technical reason to release separate Atmos and 7.1 mixes - if you tune a 7.1 mix, it can be in the Atmos track. And then I personally think there's no point making separate 7.1 and 5.1. Player 7.1->5.1 downmix is fine, IMO.

It's more just a question of effort - making the Atmos mix takes time, and there's the 2-channel mix to do too. How much time will they want to spend optimising the 7.1? There will be a temptation to just auto-downmix, which can lead to the loss of stem isolation described, which is contrary to many people's taste. (I'm personally more about the spatial aspect than the isolation, so I think it would bug me less).

But even with auto-downmix, I think we 7.1 users potentially win. Music has tended to stick with 5.1, but Atmos always gives us 7.1. We get a bit more surround separation.

Although I'm not clear how much easy control Dolby give on the auto-downmix. It may be that there is a simple knob which favours horizontal spread. Kind of a "top->7.1 downmix width" control.

I think some people are envisaging an overhead pan from L->Ltf->Rtr->Rrs to be mapped linearly from L->Rrs in the downmix, so stuff that was deliberately isolated towards Ltf always ends up somewhere mid-front-left and coming out of multiple speakers

But for music rather than films, where spatial relation to picture is not the aim, the geometry could be stretched so that effectively Ltf is downmixed to L, remaining isolated, Rtr to Rrs, and only stuff between Ltf and Rtr goes into the midfield.

(Is that how Auro-3D works? Collapsing each height into its corresponding base channel? In which case Atmos could certainly have provided that control to imitate it...)
Thanks for your reply; you said exactly what I was going to say.

It is indeed all about the authoring, and it is a matter of debate how much effort goes into the 5.1 mix after the Atmos is mixed. In the case of Abbey Road, they put a DTS-HD mix on the BD-A, so they had to give it some attention. In the case of Automatic for the People, there is no 5.1 option, and some of the choices exemplify the exact situation you describe. For example, when an object radiates out from the Left Front Ceiling, rather than localize that object in the Left on the base 7.1 track, it ends up being distributed across LF, C, and LR if you attempt playback on a non-Atmos system. Since that was one of the very first Atmos albums, I would hope some lessons have been learned since then.
 
I did not get Atmos for this one, but might have missed something.

Yep--I've just heard that the engineer is actually working on the Atmos mix right now. (The studio must have jumped the gun with their press release and Facebook post.) But it will be on Apple Music as soon as it's finished. For the moment--as others have pointed out--the Atmos mixes of Adams's Become trilogy are up and available to stream.
 
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