I’m a believer in the potential benefits of more channels for musical listening. I’ve listened to some Apple Music in 7.1 - no height channels. I thought it was interesting to hear older recordings re-mastered in multi-channel. Some of them worked really well, others seemed to gain little from it. As for two channel mixes in Atmos - some of them work better than others. I don’t hear it as a game changing improvement for 2 channel playback but the fact that the same multi-channel recording can gracefully scale back to 2 channel playback seems like a good thing. For now I’m listening to everything in 2 channel format, matrix up-mixed to 3 speaker playback and finding it to be overall preferable. What I’d like to experiment with is mixing the left, center, and right channels of an Atmos mix back down to 2 channel, and then I’d mix them back up to 3 channel using my own matrix. I want to do this because I don’t like how most Atmos recordings treat center imaged sounds. They play the left and right channels along with the center, or sometimes not the center at all. It’s just plain stereo with a phantom center image. I prefer a strong use of the center channel. From what I can tell it’s not easy to get access to the individual digital channel streams from an Atmos recording so that you can manipulate them to your liking.
How to Setup Your Room for Atmos and Immersive Audio
I think this video by the Dolby Institute is targeted at professionals but the principals translate to the home. You’ll notice that they don’t use the ceiling speakers pointing straight down but bookshelves that are angled toward the MLP. The other thing you’ll notice is that all of the bed channel speakers are at the same height (that includes the center channel). At 16:00 minute in the video make sure to watch the part about room tuning, very helpful as to what DSP can and cannot do:
" I feel like money spent on this type of help (room treatments and acoustics) will be more valuable than any piece of gear you will ever buy"