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Dolby Atmos is a surround sound technology developed by Dolby Laboratories. It expands on existing surround sound systems by adding height channels as well as free-moving sound objects, interpreted as three-dimensional objects with neither horizontal nor vertical limitations. Following the release of Atmos for the cinema market, a variety of consumer technologies have been released under the Atmos brand. The initial cinema Atmos systems used in-ceiling loudspeaker, then upward-firing speakers (e.g. for ) were introduced as an alternative for consumer products. Atmos is also used on some devices that do not have a height channel, such as , , , and Tablet computer.
In 2016, Power was the first television show natively mixed and broadcast in Atmos for its third season, though in the same year, Game of Thrones up-mixed their previous 5.1 presentations for the Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray reissue. R.E.M.'s 1992 album Automatic for the People was the first major music release with its 25th anniversary reissue in 2017.
In 2022, Dolby Atmos partnered with NetEase to offer spatial audio to the Chinese music streaming market. The partnership will entail NetEase to implement Atmos support on compatible smartphones and vehicles.
Dolby Atmos home theaters can be built upon conventional 5.1 and 7.1 layouts. For Dolby Atmos, the nomenclature differs slightly by an additional number at the end, that represents the number of overhead or Dolby Atmos enabled speakers: a 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos system is a conventional 7.1 layout with four overhead or Dolby Atmos enabled speakers. The simplest Dolby Atmos setup is 3.1.2, the most complex one is 24.1.10.
Dolby Atmos content is authored using compatible digital audio workstation software (Dolby supplies a plug-in for Pro Tools and Cubase) or a suitably equipped large format audio mixing console such as AMS Neve's DFC or Harrison Audio's MPC5.
The Dolby Atmos sound system consists of a compatible speaker system, a TV or AV media player, and an AV receiver (or preprocessor), with a Dolby Atmos object audio renderer. During playback, each theater's Dolby Atmos system renders the audio objects in real time based on the known locations of the loudspeakers present in the target theater, such that each audio object is heard as originating from its designated set of coordinates. By way of contrast, conventional multichannel technology essentially burns all the source audio tracks into a fixed number of channels during post-production. This has conventionally forced the re-recording mixer to make assumptions about the playback environment that may not apply very well to a particular theater. The addition of audio objects allows the mixer to be more creative, to bring more sounds off the screen, and be confident of the results.
The first-generation cinema hardware, the "Dolby Atmos Cinema Processor", supports up to 128 discrete audio tracks and up to 64 unique speaker feeds. The technology was initially created for Movie theater applications, and was later adapted to home cinema. In addition to playing back a standard 5.1 or 7.1 mix using loudspeakers grouped into arrays, the Dolby Atmos system can also give each loudspeaker its own unique feed based on its exact location, thereby enabling many new front, surround, and even ceiling-mounted height channels for the precise panning of select sounds such as a helicopter or rain.
Several audio equipment manufacturers, including Denon, Marantz, Onkyo, Pioneer, and Yamaha introduced products compatible with Dolby Atmos, ranging from high-end home cinema receivers and preamplifiers to mid-range home-theater-in-a-box (HTiB) packages. tvOS12 for the Apple TV 4K, released on September 17, 2018, added support for Dolby Atmos with Dolby Digital Plus.
Dolby Atmos-enabled speakers are available in two configurations:
Dolby Atmos for Music, an audio-only iteration of the format was adopted by streaming music services Tidal (uses E-AC3) and Amazon Music in December 2019.
Sennheiser launched a new sound bar with built-in Dolby Atmos technology named AMBEO sound bar at the 2019 CES in Las Vegas. The sound bar utilizes analysis of a room's reflective characteristics to enable a single-unit 5.1.4 setup.
On May 17, 2021, Apple Music announced the addition of spatial audio with support for Dolby Atmos and lossless audio. The feature was introduced to Apple Music users on Apple devices starting from June 7, 2021. Dolby Atmos is now fully supported on Android with Windows support coming in the future.
Streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, Vudu, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video and HBO Max stream movies and TV shows in Dolby Atmos. It is also used for Concert film and other live entertainment streaming services, such as On Air.
The application of Atmos in home theatres differs from cinemas primarily because of restricted bandwidth and a shortfall in processing power. A spatially-coded sub-stream is added to Dolby TrueHD or Dolby Digital Plus or is present as metadata in Dolby MAT 2.0, an LPCM-like format. This sub-stream is an efficient representation of the full, original object-based mix. This is not a matrix-encoded channel, but a spatially-encoded digital signal with panning metadata. Atmos in home theaters can support 24.1.10 channels and uses the spatially-encoded object audio sub-stream to mix the audio presentation to match the installed speaker configuration. There are programs from Dolby that handle 128 objects (including 118 dynamic objects and 10 beds) for macOS and Windows.
To reduce the bit rate in Dolby Atmos, nearby objects and speakers are grouped into clusters known as aggregate objects, which are then dynamically panned through a process referred to as spatial coding by Dolby. The audio from the original objects can be distributed across multiple aggregate objects to preserve the original objects' sound power and position. Filmmakers have control over the spatial resolution and the degree of clustering when using the Dolby Atmos Production Suite tools. Additionally, Dolby Digital Plus has been updated to include Atmos extensions.
Windows 10 version 1703 ("Creators Update") added platform-level support for spatial sound processing, including Windows Sonic for Headphones and Dolby Atmos for Headphones. Dolby Atmos for headphones requires a license to function which can be purchased or redeemed inside the Dolby Access app. Some branded headphones designed explicitly to deliver better audio quality exist, but users can use their normal headphones or earphones so long as the decoding device uses Atmos, or the audio track itself has been previously downmixed.
With the release of third-generation AirPods in October 2021, Apple added support for Dolby Atmos, branded Spatial Audio, to all AirPods (third-generation and newer), AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, and most headphones marketed under the Beats brand.
Dolby's first implementation of Atmos in an automobile was the Lucid Air sedan from Lucid Motors.
Other brands that have since sold cars equipped with Dolby Atmos include Hyundai Genesis, Li Auto, Lotus Cars, Mercedes-Benz, Polestar, Rivian, Volvo, Cadillac, and Xiaomi.
The technology has been licensed to other brands by Dolby. Since its launch, the Dolby Atmos format has been used by/affiliated with several companies in consumer technology as well as major film productions. This has added to the overall availability of content for Dolby Atmos' users.
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