Dolby Atmos coming soon for home use

[Blu-Dog]

Originally Posted by Lentulus Batiatus

Why? What other new audio format releases came with equipment add-ons to get your current gear to work Can't think of any. If your receiver was Dolby Digital but not dts there wasn't a dts box to add on. Nor any TrueHD or dtsHD-MA add-ons. If you want to upgrade to Atmos and don't have an upgradable receiver then you need to buy a new one. Besides, any sort of add-on device will cost as much as a new unit all together. Just plain dumb idea all around.

Compression formats did not have to power speakers. Granted, if you wanted to go to 6.1 or 7.1, you needed a new receiver, but for 5.1, you didn't.


It was a simple matter to decode the codec to PCM, and feed distinct and discrete channels to a receiver. I've been doing this for years to a 7.1 receiver, with no decoding, and I'm as dumb as a board.


Perhaps you never noticed this capability in a player, or have a receiver that automatically decodes the codec. That's very nice, and I'm glad you didn't have to burn out any brain cells getting the job done. It's quite possible you have very few spares.


What you may not be aware of is a phenomenon called "pass-through". It's very technical, but exists on most of the less expensive receivers, and allows a signal to "pass through" (get it? It passes through the unit) and allows the signal to be decoded in the final unit in the data chain. The final unit in the chain can decode the HDCP signal.


It's not difficult to allow decoding on multiple units in a rig, for the manufacturer, especially in a situation like this. An external unit handling Atmos chores can peel off the signal, and a separate amp within it can power as many channels as is desired. The signal can be passed through (I can draw you a picture, with your favorite crayons, if you haven't eaten them already - I'm sure the purple ones are pretty much gone already) to a receiver or pre-amp that already is capable of decoding the normal Dolby and DTS signals, either in lossless or lossy format. It wouldn't matter.


In this way, the format doesn't make outmoded advanced pre-amplifiers from folks like Macintosh, Krell, and others. In case you're not familiar with these names, you'd have to break not only your own piggy bank, but those of all your friends (still have any of those?) just to look at one in the store. Dolby is looking for initial adopters of the format to be well-heeled, discriminating buyers, who generally don't toss state of the art gear off the front porch and run out to buy the latest home theater in a box that has four more speaker outlets.


I own the Pioneer 84tXsi receiver - two of them (use your fingers to count - we don't want to be here all day), neither of which natively decode anything but the lossy formats for DTS and Dolby. Oddly enough, I've been listening to lossless audio on both of these units for about seven years (you still have fingers left over, use your toes if you can't keep up) with amazing sound. I didn't have to replace the receivers.


I know you don't have really high end gear - add Rotel to that list, and you can look up others - that don't need to be discarded because you think the owners are dumb. I only have one request.