It's my understanding from speaking to someone peripherally involved with Atmos mixing in the US that with the sudden demand for Atmos mixes for streaming services, there's a kind of assembly-line process for creating these mixes for artists who either don't care about surround or don't have provisions in their contracts to approve (or reject) a surround mix. I was told that for these mixes the SOP is to just recall the stereo mix and push a few elements partially into the height speakers, and the same with the surrounds, effectively so that if you put your ear up to the speaker you can verify that it's doing something. To my mind, this accounts for the huge amount of "is it in yet?" surround mixes that have proliferated on Atmos streaming thusfar, and it fills me with dread that the major labels are repeating the same mistakes of the original SACD/DVD-A era all over again. The fact that the Atmos mix of Tattoo You was dumped onto streaming services with little fanfare and not released on Blu-Ray at all should tell you all you need to know about how much faith they have in its quality.
I don't buy the idea that the approach to this mix is a philosophical issue when cheapness or laziness is a much more plausible explanation. It may be two guitars, vocals, bass, drums and keyboards, but there's a reason albums (especially by 1981) were recorded on 16, 24, 36 or 48 tracks and not 8. Bands didn't just go into the studio, play live and then go home - they added all sorts of overdubs, double-tracked guitars, added backing vocals, harmony vocals, percussion and so on. The wiki page for this album lists at least 12 different non-Stones people who contributed other instruments to this album. Additionally, Bob Clearmountain's mixes during this period were a masterclass in making "simple" rock bands, most of which weren't massively different from the Stones in terms of configuration, sound huge, from Roxy Music (Avalon), to Bryan Adams (Cuts Like a Knife, Reckless) to to David Bowie (Let's Dance) to Bruce Springsteen (Born in the USA). In fact, I'd argue that the Stones called in Clearmountain (who was a master of production trickery and was at the forefront of using natural reverb for the "big" sound that defined the '80s) exactly BECAUSE they wanted a fancy mix - if they wanted something that sounded like a bunch of stripped-down demos there were a million Jimmy Nonames they could've used at the time.
I haven't seen them with my own two eyes, but I'm sure there are more than enough elements on these master tapes to make a satisfying surround mix without turning it into ostentatious 4-corner bongo fury - Clearmountain's 5.1 mixes of Roxy Music's Avalon and Bryan Adams Reckless are more than proof of this. There's already a mix of this album with all of the sound coming out of the front of the room, and it's called the stereo mix. Making a surround mix that retains 95% of the stereo mix and then allocates the other 5% between all the other height and surround speakers is either a failure of imagination, a crisis in confidence, or an exercise in cost-savings, and no matter which combination of the three it is, it's a pity. Surround offers an amazing canvas for a mixing engineer to paint on, it's a shame that so few are either unwilling or not allowed to fully utilize it.
