Dolby Atmos coming soon for home use

[FilmFreakosaurus]

Ladies and gentlemen! Hang on to your butts!

Dolby just announced that Atmos rendering will be unleashed onto Onkyo, Denon, Pioneer, etc. pre-amps and receivers this fall with Atmos encoded Blu-ray's to follow and with more on the way in 2015. A few current receiver and pre-amp models will be getting Atmos firmware updates.

http://blog.dolby.com/2014/06/dolby-...ing-room-near/

http://www.twice.com/news/blu-raydvd...due-year/45750


No new Blu-ray player will be necessary. I'm assuming Dolby and DTS are piggybacking extension files onto traditional TrueHD and Master Audio bitstreams. Older equipment will just ignore the extra data.

Currently, there are two upper-scale consumer Atmos flavors that can also be down-converted/re-mapped to smaller theater setups:

7.1 + 4 overhead speakers or 9.1 (7.1 with 2 front wide surrounds) + 2 overhead speakers. There are 4 subwoofer outputs. Presumably 2 for the front and 2 for the surrounds via bass management. The LFE channel may be split to all 4.

Details are sketchy about the technical information. Is it truly lossless? What are the bit depth and sampling rates supported? How many total speakers can the metadata instructions control... more than 11.4... how scalable is it? How many objects are supported? Etc. Etc.

DTS cannot be far behind with their own DTS-UHD announcements.