Article: Music - Ultimate Guide To High End Immersive Audio

[jrobbins50]

@The Computer Audiophile, an excellent overview, and I am, as you know, a big fan of the Atmos format and definitely appreciate the ever burgeoning content being released.  I am certainly looking forward to commercial streaming of lossless Atmos content.  
 

I will take issue with but one point in your fine article. Although very little new to my knowledge is being issued in discrete 5.1 or quad multichannel, there are several thousand albums in this format — all lossless — which most audio systems set up for Dolby Atmos can play and their owners should still consider. Some of these legacy MCH mixes are, in my opinion, far better to listen to than the lossy, and even in some cases the lossless, Atmos mixes that have been released to date. I will offer one (perhaps blasphemous) example. To my (admittedly poor) ears, the 2003 30th Anniversary Mix of Pink Floyd’s DSOTM, available on SACD (which can be ripped to a hard drive), uses the surround channels better than the side/rear of the TrueHD lossless Atmos mix. I hear it in particular on the track “Us And Them,” as those words are sung and spin around the room.

 

Of course, at this point, there are still many discrete, and very good, MCH albums that have yet to be re-mixed and re-mastered for Atmos, and discrete MCH is the only way currently to listen to such surround mixes.  Two discrete MCH album examples are Dire Straits’s “Brothers In Arms” and Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” (two tracks of which are currently available in Atmos).  “Watermelon Man” from Herbie Hancock’s “Head Hunters” album, in 5.1 MCH is truly mind-bending.  I encourage readers who set up Atmos systems of 5.1.2 or larger to compare discrete MCH for themselves. JCR