Get started with Dolby Atmos

You’ve heard the name. Dolby is, and has been, everywhere in the world of audio, from noise reduction on your ’80s Walkman to kitting out your local cinema screen with industrial-grade amplification. It’s taking a stab at the visual market, too, with Dolby Vision–more on that in future issues.

We’re here to talk about Dolby Atmos, an audio tech which some have claimed is the biggest upgrade to surround sound in 20 years. It’s trickled down to the home from beginnings in cinema screens, and literally adds a new dimension to living room sound by adding height channels to audio. Or, at least, that’s one thing it does. Let’s first explore what Dolby Atmos is.

Dolby Atmos isn’t, in itself, sound; it is a system of turning that audio into objects. Up to 128 individual elements in a scene are separated out into their own discrete tracks, each of which is given its own metadata which communicates to a Dolby Atmos-compatible receiver the way it should be handled. That metadata might include height channel or other positional information, or designate the track as a voice or background, but it doesn’t make explicit demands; it’s merely a way of communicating to compatible equipment.