How to Setup Your Room for Atmos and Immersive Audio

@kota1 I'm going to give up and hang my extra atoms speakers BL, BR, and the tops even though I know the sound is the boss in Atmos and the imaging works fine now but I know it's not just right. I'll have to add speaker cable and hang the top speakers. I really didn't want to make my room ugly for speakers that are only there for background work. 5.1 is really all people are asking for and if I get to excited about mixing for the rears and the tops my mix won't translate like it should back to 5.1 or stereo. My room has no parallel walls only the floor and ceiling. I love my speakers and the fact that they are so precise in the imaging department is still surprising even after months of listening.

@kota1 Thanks, one cool thing is that I have 4x Dolby Atmos systems in my house I can play it on a few of those. And I have a 7.1 system in my car that is very good I think Mark Levenson makes it. 

I don't add any EQ to my speakers in the professional rig because I want to be like Al Schmitt and get it right without tweeks as he used to position microphones without EQ for the same reason. I know some of the guys who did "fix" many of Frank Sinatras songs especially the "Duets" album even after they were told to not touch a thing, it's to hard to not make it better when you know you can. 

@kota1 The more I think about it and the more I play with my panning joysticks on my ProTools S4 control mixer I'm thinking symmetrical is not the proper layout for surround channels. In my Home Theater everything is symmetrical and fairly large, I set it up with and without the Lyngdorf Room Perfect DSP it doesn't really make a difference except it seems to turn up all my surround sound speakers. My professional system is not symmetrical other than the front L, C, R speakers and it images perfectly with or without the DSP. I think our brains are fooled by symmetrical surround sounds, symmetrical is not natural nothing really happens like that and our brains can't process rear surrounds coming from equal and opposite angles. Therefore I'm keeping everything a little off of symmetrical and leaning on the object orientation of the phantom channels. I've never heard of someone going about it this way before, the speakers are close to symmetric but not exactly and I'm not using any DSP at all so the imaging is only ½ the distance of the difference of the out of symmetry factor. I think that is the key to very nice ambiences and shockingly tight imaging in the surrounds. I'll let you know where this path takes me. I'l be working on it all night I think.

Also if you know of some good Atmos test downloads that would be helpful, Thanks.

Also I saw Shen Sun today at an amazing performing arts theater here in Boise the music was beautiful and the mics they used were cheap u57s mostly (very low end work hors mics) and the orchestra soundsd wonderful because the room was so good, moral of the story if you have a good room many sins are forgiven.

@kota1 So I discovered something that I thought I knew but didn't know for sure. In  acoustics and photography and many other arts there is something called the rule of thirds, well I panned (actually I entered the info) to have the front speakers ⅓ of the way back and ⅓ of the way in, when I did that it felt like I moved into the stage a bit. It was interesting that when these numbers were exact and my head was right in the sweet spot the effect was very strong. I'm not sure panning in the traditional sense would have achieved the same effect. The only other satisfying speaker position was full blown stereo 100% left and right which felt more natural.

It is an odd thing to set up music this way, I was a musician and a monitor mixer for bands when you are in the listening position and you are facing the band looking at speakers you are engulfed in it but facing the wrong way, even with side fills as a musician is used to it feels wrong.

@Kota1 Say you have a speaker at 135 degrees to your right behind you and say you have a signal from 225 degrees on your left behind you. You can’t perceive a phantom center channel between them but that is how Atmos works, Atmos creates phantom channels that are moveable. To me the only way to fix this is to not have the surround channels symmetric. A much clearer example is where you have Atmos speakers in the ceiling behind you at equal angles they nearly reach your ears at the same time not allowing your brain to position them well at all. Other than using a very dead room it doesn’t seem like there is an answer other than making the speakers non symmetrical, playback would still work because no two systems would be the same about of non symmetricalness, if that’s even a word. What do you think?

@kota1 i forgot to mention fib. Numbers are cool, I’m curious how you can set them up without something like Protools, do you have something that lets you pan the signal between the speakers? How do you use the fib numbers?

So I just spen 2 hours redoing my “room perfect” DSP. I played Elton John’s “Sorry seems to be…” it sounded awful in Atmos and much bigger wider deeper in stereo. Is it possible my room sounds better without DSP I don’t even know if I can turn it off or maybe not movies sound great, why did the same song have such a poor showing in Atmos.

Hemispherical speaker are a great idea just like PZM microphones they don’t “see” the plain they are mounted to, makes a lot of sense.

The curve seems ok in real life speakers and microphones sound bad next to a big reflection is simply because of phasing, midrange (1K) usually gets the most noticeable damage this happens if a singer is standing to close to a music stand in the studio it makes a big difference when you lower or remove the stand, if that fails you put a fuzzy blanket over it. That curve is only a single frequency sine wave, music doesn’t look like that, in fact the curves we see on ARK and DSPs like that are just a representation of an averaging algorithm, sound doesn’t look like that only tones do, sound looks like pressure waves. I tried to use a chemical to show sound once, I was working to much, I should pursue it again now, I think I will.