For those who build new home theatre rooms

[joyous]

Here's the new setup, juct checked due to Kamalhasan movie 'Viswaroopam'. The same technology is available for home theater too.

Auro-3D / Auro Technologies : Three-dimensional sound

 

[sbg]

any idea on how these are different to dolby's atmos

 

[manoj.p]

The Auro 3D is more height channels.

Dolby Atmos is object based 3d sound. It does not have any dedicated channels anymore. Consider the listening room as a 3D box, with co-ordinates as X (width), Y (length) and Z (height). During mastering, Atmos puts the sound at any location using x, y, z co-ordinates in 3d space and what intensity it should be. During playback, the processor has the room layout and speaker layout as well. So depending upon the no of speakers and room size, the processor decodes the main signal and then decides where to image it in the room using appropriate speakers. Lets say, there is a sound that should be on left wall, between side and front speaker, it will send that information to both side and left front speaker and it will image there in between. If there is dedicated wide speaker there, it will send the info to that speaker. That way, Dolby Atmos is not restricted in how many no of channels it has, because it can virtually have infinite speakers. Now imagine how much real-time processing power is needed for the processors.

 

[sbg]

but what I recollect is , these do have 128 discreet audio info at hand and can be projected to about 64 points.

 

[manoj.p]

Yup. The possibilities are quite endless because this model is scalable. But the real time processing power for mapping to so many speakers is indeed limited.

For all practical purpose, Dolby has limited those points, both from physical placement and processing power point of view.