Immersive Audio and How to Achieve It

As I have read through the above posts it call goes back and forth somewhat comically to me. All immersive is stereo. Everything is stereo. There is nothing else besides stereo. Atmos cannot supercede stereo. Nothing else exists besides stereo. And because there was some debate above about whether anyone dare say 100%, I dare say everyone, i.e., 100% in this thread can only hear stereo, unless there is someone here that insists they have more than two ears, perhaps an extra ear on their back, their elbow or someplace. Stereo means two, as in two ears, two auditory senses. Our ears sense spatially and make other assessments based on milliseconds of timing, and so do are ears/mind assess accuracy, clarity, transparency, etc. that have little to do with the spatial issues Atmos makes a fortune over, or THX, or etc. I agree with the post above about the Oregon symphony: the tech-masters are messing up the natural, acoustic sounds rendered by musicians and their instruments, adding, in my opinion, purposeful distortion and dilution to the real performance. That’s a pity, and even though those on a tech-kick may get some juice out of the aural sensation, it won’t last because it isn’t the creative composition. Next, are the techies going to start calling themselves musicians? I read the article about the techie in Vegas & Santana. When the techie starts getting billed on the Vegas skyline billboards above the musicians-singers, then I may change my opinion. But as long as its the musician-singer I want to hear, then it’s not some techie who’s the maker-creator of music I want messing with my ears. I just want to hear the musician, accurately, reproduced faithfully, in high fidelity. Anything else, to me, is comical.

Technically, to record at 128 discrete locations would require the mixer to combine them faithfully in, what, 128 to what power number of ways to choose from? And with how many intermediate audio components to decode? Or, without mixing, then with 128 channels and speakers to reproduce? More than there are persons in a full orchestra? (Put a mike on every violinist.) It just seems to me to be a lot of marketing beyond man’s capacity to handle and make sense of... so, if there was ever a time to KISS?

On the other hand, I can certainly understand why persons without a system that provides adequate spatial realism would jump at any promises of possible improvement because they know their systems are lacking. And even audiophiles to check out any and all latest technological developments that could prove beneficial. "Prove all things; hold fast to that which is good."

But I return to the point that all "stereo", preceded by whatever descriptive adjective above, still enters our senses in a stereo-solid two-ear configuration, attaining 3-D realism based on the distance between our ears and perceiving distance/depth by milliseconds of timing differences. That depth may be created via 128 channels or via a few milliseconds delay in a traditional stereo recording by the timing of the sound arriving at two-channel microphones. (Perhaps the biggest challenge in milliseconds/depth perception is that speakers' transient response still has the driver waiting to stop vibrating thereby masking the arrival of the secondary, tertiary sounds within the same few ms time span.)

That we have our own sound decoders in our infinitely superior mental technology that can still sense almost immeasurable discrepancies between live and recorded sound will likely always be unmatchable by any human-made technology and may never be satisfied by all our feeble attempts.