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Comment by leetrout | Hacker News Reader

Atmos sucks. Everything mixed for shows these days sucks at home. You can never hear what people are saying and then you get blasted with 10-20db higher music or sound effects.

I wish there was an easy fix for THAT which works across any device without having to buy a receiver and speakers and deal with all the connections or needing the same on basically every TV in the house.

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I swear they used to mix for two channel AND multichannel. I know they did because I’ll rip a dvd or Blu-ray and see four or five English channels of various formats.

Online stuff especially seems to only mix for multichannel and it doesn’t downgrade to two channel well at all.

Yeah, that’s the whole selling point of Atmos. No more discrete channels to mix to, instead spatial locations that the receiver decodes for your system.

Yes. I still buy everything I can on BD (or DVD as a fallback)[1], and nearly every release has separate stereo and surround mixes for the primary language of the film. Sometimes even for multiple languages.

I assume only having one audio mix on streaming services is a cost-cutting measure, like how most streaming services seem to omit professionally-produced subtitles from third-party content in favour of awful phonetic subtitles they produce themselves using ML or similar.

[1] So I'll still have it when obscure content is inevitably removed from streaming services, for the higher picture quality, and for the finer-grained playback control.

Streaming services are absolutely awful for image quality and your favorite shows will disappear at the whims of corporate lawyers and executives. Netflix 4K streams are less than 16 mbps at the absolute max with 4 mbps being commonplace whereas the specification for UHD Blu-Ray discs allows for three disc capacities, each with its own data rate: 50 GB at 72 or 92 Mbit/s, and 66 GB and 100 GB at 92 Mbit/s, 123 or 144 Mbit/s. The bitrate difference is not something advances in codecs can make up for because the gulf is too wide.

The vast majority of us are thrilled with streaming quality and would rather use speakers from our TV than a sound system. I actually have a sound system and haven't bothered to turn it on in a few years.

We are optimizing for the minority.

I agree. Just give me a stereo track, and I'm happy enough. I don't want to buy a receiver and install multiple speakers in my living room/kitchen/office, thank you

Object-based audio is a great idea that makes the most sense with some sort of headphones while watching something on TV so you can be fully immersed in the scene as you turn your head. It is definitely the next major frontier on the audio frontier. Unfortunately, it is mired in proprietary protocols, very expensive hardware that doesn't work right, totally deceptive advertising, and poorly mastered source material.

And, like VR, works wonders if you're in a room by yourself; once you are watching something with a group, now everyone has headphones on and it's all a mess.

It turns out the vast majority of people around the world prefer the convenience of streaming (large choice, worldwide selection of content, immediate access, etc.) over waiting for and managing physical discs. Moreover, nobody would want to wait for the next episode of a TV show to arrive on a disc.

You could stream at higher bitrates (apparently Apple does) without resorting to discs.

You might even be able to design an adaptive bit-rate codec that improves/devolves as your internet connection demands.

On the flip side, every blu ray player I've ever had the pleasure of using has been clearly audible over the content I've been watching.

I gave up and bought an Xbox as a blurry player, and it works decently well.

But I prefer to rip everything anyway, and the Apple TV that plays the rips is silent as far as I can tell.

There's two easy options for this:

Put the player in a cabinet with glass doors. That will dampen most of the noise.

Turn the movie up. This also works for road noise in a car.

> Put the player in a cabinet with glass doors. That will dampen most of the noise.

So replace my furniture? No thanks.

> Turn the movie up. This also works for road noise in a car.

Have you heard the sound balance on movies these days?

> Have you heard the sound balance on movies these days?

Yeah, it's not always great, but it's usually enough to drown out the sound of the disc rotation. About the only time I hear the player is on DVDs with rough layer transitions, the video and audio pause a bit and you can often hear the pickup seeking or refocusing, especially if it's a parallel track path disc so the next layer begins at the other end of the disc from where the current layer ends.

There is an exception here with AppleTV+ which has a 20-40Mbit/s bit rate. Not quite Blu-ray level but it's very obvious when compared to Netflix.

That is a good bitrate for 4K with modern codecs.

A true stereo Lt/Rt mix was standard in the DVD era. But even before Blu-ray/HD-DVD was released, the move to removing the Lt/Rt mix in favor of 5.1 only was already gaining traction. The number of 5.1 mixes encoded correctly that would allow for a decent 2.0 fold down was quite small.

Even today, I'm dealing with 5.1 content where the LFE was not bussed correctly so that there is frequencies > 120Hz. This isn't from Bob's Audio Post House. These are from people that should know better.

I have to disagree that Atmos itself sucks. The problem is that for marketing reasons it was decided to put Atmos in situations that it should never be in. A soundbar cannot benefit from Atmos and it should have never been put there in the first place.

I have a 5.1.2 setup that I setup myself, I did the optimizations (really just used the automated thing) and its great. I never have an issue with not hearing things.

I have even seen arguments that if you only have a 5.1 (or 5.2) setup Atmos is worthless for you, but at least in that situation at worst you are just getting roughly the same output.

Basically, if you don't have those extra speakers (or real surround sound) there was no reason that Atmos should have ever been marketed to you and it is doing everyone (including the spec) a disservice.

>A soundbar cannot benefit from Atmos and it should have never been put there in the first place.

ATMOS is a new way of doing things, where the object's position is recored and your hardware can adapt to it based on its configuration.

This is infinitely better than shipping stereo, 5.1, 7.1 etc hardcoded mixes and switching between them. Now you only need to ship ONE spatial track (ok, multiple because of things like TrueHD, but you only have one spatial variant per-quality-tier).

ATMOS means you can have 1 set of media that scales from 1 to N speakers seamlessly.

Theoretically yes that is true, however in practice it has been shown time and time again that if you have less than a 5.1.2 setup Atmos is at best worthless and not actually getting you a benefit and at worse giving you a negative experience due to loosing the ability to properly balance.

Atmos was shoved into setups that it does not belong.

I've got a 5.1.4 home theater setup that all together — including LG OLED TV, Elac Debut speakers, Pioneer AV Receiver, shelves, etc — cost about 2000€ (pretty much everything was bought used, I had to repair several parts myself)

And it turns out with a properly calibrated setup, the mix is perfectly fine. Everything sounds just as it should, music envelops you without becoming overwhelming, the dialog is easily audible and absolutely crisp.

And the atmos effects actually work. For example Altered Carbon S1 made really good use of the overhead speakers.

Considering how much worse the audio was with a soundbar, and how streaming has been hurting cinemas for years, I can't help but wonder if these shitty stereo mixes might be intentional.

I've got an over the top 7.1.4 setup, and after running with the calibrated setup for a while, bumping the center speaker several notches was very helpful with hearing dialogue from all sources I've tried. Even in my 4.1 setups, I've boosted the center virtual speaker. So I'm not surprised people are having trouble with the mixes if they don't have the ability to adjust things.

Personally, I haven't used soundbars, the home theater shop that put together my theater did a demo with one that had two wireless? satellites and it was actually pretty good, but most soundbars are using small drivers so it takes a lot of tech to make them sound good for mid-low frequency. Otoh, modern very thin tvs have such minimal speakers that anything else is better.

That's great that you have a great setup. There's a bit of an issue in practice, where only a tiny bit of people have a good setup, so sound isn't great for 99.99% of people.

That's the point — even my relatively affordable (for a home theater setup) system is still far outside the price range of 99.9% of the world.

So for the vast majority of people, the only way to properly listen to a movie is in cinemas.

As I already touched upon earlier, I don't think that's by accident.

That's interesting, I figure it's just they don't want to spend any money to do sound settings differently for people's houses. They just don't care.

I wish they would just provide a simple stereo mix for those of us that don't want to clutter their living room with a receiver and speakers. Netflix actually provides a stereo mix that works quite well, while Disney plus has an horrible Dolby mix where you lose half of the speech unless you increase your volume to insane levels

If I were more conspiracy-minded, I'd call it a stealth effort to make people Return To Theaters and stop watching movies at home.

>Atmos sucks. Everything mixed for shows these days sucks at home. You can never hear what people are saying and then you get blasted with 10-20db higher music or sound effects.

This is certainly not true in the generic sense, and is likely an issue with your setup/hardware.

I got Atmos with my new Soundbar, a Samsung Q990C, which admittedly was not cheap, but with Atmos it really does work well. It sounds like thunder is above me, planes flying above, with the sound bouncing off the ceiling. I was quite impressed.

In the future that will probably be Auracast (Bluetooth LE Audio) and using personalized earbuds (or hearing aids). Then everyone can manage their own volume and preferences.

I'm super excited for Auracast. It's been shocking to me that products haven't really materialized in the 20 months since announcement. Samsung's next flagship ultra expensive TV and their top of the line earbuds were rumored - just this week - to gain Auracast.

I wish I had a little more hope for it in these entertainment scenarios. It's got a fancy proprietary codec, but pretty mediocre bandwidth. I think right now it's only spec is for stereo. Trying to get custom immersive audio to a bunch of people requires spatial audio & fancier multi-stream sending.

Most soundbars, I think, allow you to control this. My Sonos does, at least, and I absolutely employ that feature!

Subtitles everywhere, baby. [explosion]

They are mixing for phones and ipads.

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