then make a cross everywhere, what the sound engineers have already finished last Wednesday. 
The statement is already funny and convicts itself. One stands without personnel (sufficiently good sound engineers before an unsolvable task).
I donāt know that the statement meant they actually did all the mixes on Wednesday. 
I think multichannel audio is on the verge of gaining critical mass in the marketplace. It used to be fringe with a small number of DVD, DVD-A and SACD discs. Streaming in multichannel soundtracks as all the big players do has made surround sound setups much more common in households, which means a much larger possible market for surround music. But an even larger potential market is mobile. Now that Apple and Tidal are both streaming it, and Appleās Airpods Max and Pro are compatible, weāre in a very different place marketwise for surround music. I should add here too that surround decoders are trickling into cars as well.
The actual content is hit and miss IMO. There are some stellar mixes such as āAvalonā by Roxy Music that I think exceed the two channel mix, and other stuff that just sounds forced. This all said, I think it will be (if not is) incumbent on Roon to incorporate mulitchannel. Right now I can play local surround files to my processor via HDMI, but having to leave the hive and go to, say, Tidal via ATV to stream is getting increasingly annoying as more content is out there to try. I know some of my clients feel the same way.
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I read a really good article about it that highlighted that very aspect, and Blue Note is swimming way up there because youāve had the best engineers on staff for decades anyway, but thereās not enough of them to bring it all out again.
The editors only found a few thousand copies in the 100,000,000 catalogs in the first place. Apple, Amazon and Co. therefore mix old material into the playlists.
One part was horrible and quickly made, but worse than the original afterwards. No that costs a lot of time, nerves and decades of experience on a level that only a few technicians really already have.
I donāt know one person who listens to this stuff or has even talked about it. Not sure itās reached niche appeal let alone mass market appeal. Canāt say Iām in any rush, I donāt have Atmos enabled system nor do I plan to. It took years for 3d to die itās natural death after all the manufacturers pushed it. Some made for 3d films worked well, most where converted and didnt. At least no silly earphones are needed but you do need to have replace kit or use proprietary stuff for the Apple stuff to work.
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They cheat a few good demos into a handful of playlists that are pimped with more bad āquick productionsā and even old originals with no technical changes. Thatās a lot of hot marketing air in there.
Those who want more than packaging, i.e. content, usually come away empty-handed. Or holds the demo material in their hands.
Agree with all of this 100%. The hardware is more common and becoming ubiquitous. The surround mixes can potentially sound more cohesive than 51. or 7.1 (due to objects versus busses). Itās scalable so the engineer only has to do it once. Streaming makes this all possible without new physical media formats being necessary - which is partly what has killed past attempts. The fact that a lot of apparently smart people here canāt identify these different dynamics at play is rather unfortunate.
And Iāll say thisā¦
Many of these older comments discounting Atmos have not aged well. Not one bit.
This is just not true. While there are plenty of bad mixes (isnāt this also true of stereo?) there are more and more great Atmos mixes. The same goes for 5.1 musicā¦some is good, and some is bad. Engineers are just learning this craft. But I suggest you go back and look again because there are now far more than a āhandful of good demosā. And the fact is that more are coming all the time. And many of the new releases are all coming in Atmos now. At what threshold would you like to be able to at least audition or listen to those mixes in Roon?
I got a firestick just to try tidal atmos (hdmi to denon avr-x3600h, tidal app on firestick).
The avr recognizes atmos and decodes it. But, volume is so low you have to turn the amp to nearly 0db to play it anywhere near loud. You can barely hear it at ānormalā levels of -40 to -30db.
I asked tidal support about it. They said āThis is a known issue and our Tech Support team is working directly with Dolby Atmos to resolve this issue with the low volume. Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this matter.ā
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Strange. I wonder if this is a firestick issue. I have Tidal running on an Nvidia Shield into a Denon x3700H and, while Atmos music is a little lower perhaps, itās maybe only 5db or so.
Yes, strange. Hereās some year-old discussion I found:
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3D always felt/looked like a gimmick, even when well done. A good surround mix can do a better and truer (it can do spatial cues and ambience more precisely among other things) job of immersing you in a performance with the right mix and material. Donāt knock it till youāve tried it.
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Have you read Forbes, then you would know that you are talking about something different.
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When I read ultra-immersive Dolby Atmos in luxury Mercedes cars, 31 speakers, 1750 watts, ultra-modern concert halls on wheels and revolutionized sound experiences, I can actually already end every article, there comes only strikingly unserious marketing drivel and no information. If audiophiles want to set up their favorite room here, well then grab it quickly, but not without a 6-month waiting period. Whether there will be enough good fodder in the music catalogs? Weāll conjure up a few quickly made and less than perfect sound recordings for it, and of course include the perfect demo CD at no extra charge.
No, so we approach this topic only with great emotion and not with serious information. New snake oil and mobile concert hall? Admittedly, for a few lucrative Mercedes ads, almost every journalist in Forbes would write down everything that is created in marketing brochures.
Which exactly proves my point.
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In many ways, car audio drives (NPI) the home audio business. It is many 10s or 100s of times larger. You can call it marketing drivel, but that itās even on automakerās maps tells you itās entering the public consciousness.
A much larger play (at the moment anyway) in that direction is that Apple is pushing spatial audio in national commercials seen by millions every day, and now itās available on probably hundreds of millions of devices ā itās happening right in front of us. Thatās not great emotion, rather just data.
Marketing works. Lack of marketing almost guarantees failure. We have never seen this scale of marketing muscle and dollars go into surround music ā not even remotely close to it in the past, which is one of the most important reasons it failed in the past.
As for emotion, itās easy to say itās all just a gimmick and the music sucks. Much of it is and does. But some of it is really good and a step up from the two channel mixes (and the amount of good content is growing at a faster pace than ever) which makes it a worthwhile endeavor for me. But letās not conflate the issues here: the quality of the recordings and the success of the format are separate things. Whatās unquestionable to me anyway is the push for success of multichannel from the industry is magnitudes greater than it ever was before, and this is the most important factor to the success of it.
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Systems installed in the Mercedes Maybach do not provide 10 or 100 scaling. When Apple has converted every iPad, iPhone, speaker, headphone, etc., think of something new for the next generation of devices, yes thatās how marketing works, but the cash cow iPhone is nearing the end of its life cycle, even if we put on Apple glasses. Everything sells better with high-end emotion. If you sell in this segment, you feel the pressure to bring something new.
Sure, Mercedes is low volume, but in the auto world thatās where new stuff starts and trickles down. Heated seats and steering wheels are ubiquitous now. So are multiple speakers around the car vs. a few in front.
And Iām sorry, but your iPhone comment makes zero sense. People have been saying the same thing for years, and each year Apple generally sells more than the last. Somehow they gotten over a billion devices out there, despite repeated predictions of āend of life cycleā. None of this is emotional, itās simply the data.
And, of course, thereās always the pressure to sell something new, this is true in almost every industry. And what the new does is drive sales; if it didnāt, industries wouldnāt do it. But youāre talking about the pros and cons of capitalism now, not the success of surround sound 
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Shouldnāt personal perspectives on the format be pretty irrelevant?
Roon prides itself on providing high end audio and support for all file formats. Atmos falls under this category, it should play it back, if you donāt like it donāt use it.
DSD is the most niche of niche formats, Roon supports it. Atmos is on a lot of streaming platforms, DSD isnāt. Its less niche than DSD, support the playback.
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I am always puzzled about comments concerning Surround Sound as if it is something not worth taking into account. It is just the next evolution to stereo as has stereo been to mono. So if you donāt to listen to it, thatās just fine. Wether this is a Marketing stunt or not is utterly unimportant at the moment you listen to it and decide that it is something for you or not.
Bad mixing is not a āprogativeā to surround but all kinds of mixing.
I am listening to surround about 20 years, first DvA, SACD, then Blu-ray audio and now streaming and I would not mis one minute of it. It gives so much space, lightweight and harmonic experience and there are really great labels and records.
That was the reason Iāve chosen for a 6.0 Surround system - all full range speakers - in the first place. Dolby Atmos is just the next step.
There are so many beautiful recordings, beginnning from the Quad records in the 70ies until the Steven Wilson mixew now that there actually shouldnāt be a discussion at all wether Roon should support this format or not. Just do it.!
By the way: I enjoy Stereo as well as Surround. But if there is a choice - and in most cases of my 600 or so surround albums there is - I always choose surround.
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