So when I was using Tidal for Atmos last night on the TV the AV Receiver was reporting DD+/Atmos which is the standard delivery method for streaming Atmos which is Dolby Digital Plus with Atmos which is the lossy encoded version, the receiver reports a sample rate of 48Khz.
The old DVD spec for standard Dolby Digital 5.1 was 384-640Kb/S whereas DTS could use up to 1.5Mb/S which is why a lot of geeks raves about DTS when comparing it to DD back in the day.
Dolby have gotten very good with compression and I reckon that DD+/Atmos of these music streams and indeed most Atmos streams from Netflix etc will be around 1Mb/S but probably not much more.
Only BluRay supports Dolby True HD with Atmos which gives you the lossless experience but I think the BitRate for that is somewhere around 6Mb/S - 18Mb/S so way too much for streaming.
The Xbox however has an odd Atmos implementation as it’s PCM/Atmos, dunno why it’s done this way but it works.
With regards to the music a matrix decoder such as the Dolby Surround encoder for Atmos receivers is very good, to the point where I just leave my receiver in that mode all the time. The only time it really struggles is if you throw really low quality stuff at it. Some of these songs don’t sound anywhere near as good as stereo through a Dolby Surround decoder.
The Papa Roach song and Linkin Park Hybrid Theory are clearly the demos that have been mixed as Atmos, in fact I’ve heard the Linkin Park stuff before on a bonus edition of Hybrid Theory with the demos as extra tracks, the only song that sounded decent to my ears out of the few I listened too was Cure For The Itch and coincidentally it was one of the only ones without a demo on the bonus track version of the album.
When Atmos audio is done right it’s transformative and sounds incredible, Limp Bizkit’s - ReArranged sounded awesome on Tidal last night as the “just think about it” record scratching moved around the sound field like you were stood in the centre of the record it moved in an almost 360° pattern from fronts to rears. So good Atmos can be done if the labels actually put some effort into it.
The old DVD spec for standard Dolby Digital 5.1 was 384-640Kb/S whereas DTS could use up to 1.5Mb/S which is why a lot of geeks raves about DTS when comparing it to DD back in the day.
Dolby have gotten very good with compression and I reckon that DD+/Atmos of these music streams and indeed most Atmos streams from Netflix etc will be around 1Mb/S but probably not much more.
Only BluRay supports Dolby True HD with Atmos which gives you the lossless experience but I think the BitRate for that is somewhere around 6Mb/S - 18Mb/S so way too much for streaming.
The Xbox however has an odd Atmos implementation as it’s PCM/Atmos, dunno why it’s done this way but it works.
With regards to the music a matrix decoder such as the Dolby Surround encoder for Atmos receivers is very good, to the point where I just leave my receiver in that mode all the time. The only time it really struggles is if you throw really low quality stuff at it. Some of these songs don’t sound anywhere near as good as stereo through a Dolby Surround decoder.
The Papa Roach song and Linkin Park Hybrid Theory are clearly the demos that have been mixed as Atmos, in fact I’ve heard the Linkin Park stuff before on a bonus edition of Hybrid Theory with the demos as extra tracks, the only song that sounded decent to my ears out of the few I listened too was Cure For The Itch and coincidentally it was one of the only ones without a demo on the bonus track version of the album.
When Atmos audio is done right it’s transformative and sounds incredible, Limp Bizkit’s - ReArranged sounded awesome on Tidal last night as the “just think about it” record scratching moved around the sound field like you were stood in the centre of the record it moved in an almost 360° pattern from fronts to rears. So good Atmos can be done if the labels actually put some effort into it.
