Dolby Atmos coming soon for home use

[ZoetMB]

Well, it's certainly possible that this will indeed will be some gigantic receiver with an "extra" 22 outputs and speaker terminals.

If you consider that anyone who is going to have 32 channels probably has a dedicated and specially built home-theatre room and if they do, probably has most of the equipment in a rack, this could possible work, although you also have to think about how much heat those 32 channels would generate and how big the power supply would have to be. Or whether they'll do something like make the extra channels only 10-20 watts each.

Which also makes me wonder whether it really includes power amps for all the channels or whether it will work more like we work today for subwoofers, where there just might be line outs for the channels beyond 7, or maybe line outs for the channels beyond 7 + the 4 overhead channels that are appearing in the first receivers and then maybe a line of multichannel power amps that don't take a lot of space, like 5 or 6 channels in a unit only 1" or 2" high.

I suppose it also could be designed into 2 or 3 units where the first unit has all the controls and the primary channels and the 2nd and 3rd units have those additional amps with either a proprietary control cable or networking between the components.

I wrote in another post last week that I thought that any system with so many channels would have to include a networking scheme to active wireless speakers for the extra channels so that you wouldn't be hard wiring all these speakers, but I realize now that was a stupid statement because in that case, you'd have to run power to them all.

It will be interesting to see how this all works out, whether the studios will support it and how many idiots will double-dip on a BD release because it's newly released with an Atmos soundtrack even if they don't have any extra channels in their home theatre setup to support it (and how inevitably they will claim that 'it sounds better' anyway).