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In Reply to: RE: Dolby ATMOS and planars? posted by methylmarty on January 10, 2015 at 11:48:52
Thanks, interesting info on Atmos and planars.
Of course, you *can* attenuate the backwave if you want to by adding absorption. A dipole actually spills less acoustical energy into the room than an omni, which is one of the reasons they need less acoustical treatment. So it should be easy to suppress that rear-directed artificial reverb, though you could end up with a sound that's too dry for two-channel stereo.
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Josh,
Excellent point. With proper rear-wave absorption dipoles should work fine in an Atmos setup. I still wonder though, how the object-based mixing will translate to a line source. It shouldn't matter if the speaker is properly vertically oriented, but a horizontally ceiling mounted setup such as mine might prove troublesome. Point sources shouldn't have this problem.
I wonder how it will translate to a line source too. A point source sounds like it's originating at the height of the speaker. A full-height line source sounds like it's originating at the height indicated by the floor bounce in the original recording. So the effect could be erratic. I'm guessing though that with horizontal line sources like yours, it will sound like it's coming from the height of the speaker, perhaps with some slight impairment to localization owing to the lateral smearing of pinna/head/body effects. Also, in my experience, MMG's behave like dipole point rather than full-length line sources when it comes to localization -- the sound seems to emanate from half way up the diaphragm, or a compromise between that and the first reflection point in the rear if the speakers are at an angle.
Of course, you never really know what's going to happen until you try it. :-)
Hey Josh, great to see you around here again! (I am mostly on "vacation".)Dumpingground, I did spend some good hours with Atmos systems in Dec. One of them was factory calibrated. All were on box speakers. Neither my friends nor I were all that impressed. Hype is a bitch, I guess.
Height information can be replicated with planars to a large extent. One of my friends commented how my (now raised MMGs) provide a better impression of frontal height than the multi-speaker factory calibrated Atmos we heard. Of course, things are never so simple but I suspect that with a full set of tall-enough Maggies, something like Atmos itself could work great for movies, with 7.x speakers surround; without even needing the extra surrounds.
I am more intrigued by what DTS:X could bring. DTS and my MMGs have always worked great (more so for movies). Furthermore, DTS-HD (Master) on musical (Blu-ray) programming is seriously enjoyable stuff. So, perhaps, DTS:X follows the progressive tradition. Anyway, I am in no hurry...cranking the crank on my old receiver is still fun : - ))
Edits: 01/14/15
Hey, JBen! Good to hear from you.
Disappointing about Atmos -- I haven't had a chance to hear it yet. Vertical spread from point sources is a bit problematic because there's no phantom image as there is laterally. So basically the sound seems to be coming from the height of the speakers, which with a single height channel means only two places. And the height pan presumably wouldn't work with a line source, since full-height line sources don't so much reproduce height as not add their own height signature and let the floor bounce do the trick. From the perspective of the comb filtering stuff that's going on in the pinna, they're a source at an infinite distance, as far as height detection is concerned (as far as width is concerned, they're a source right where the speakers are!). A smaller line source probably acts more like a point source, Davey meaxured the field of his MMG's as 1/R^2 and it seems to me that the apparent height of the sound in my MMG's was the vertical center point of the diaphragm.
If you used more than one voice coil vertically, you could reproduce both the center and height channel in a planar magnetic. Bass could still use the entire diaphragm, or its usual resonant sections (since different frequencies emanate from different heights).
Then try it I shall. Of course with my choice of height speakers costing $1200 (BG PD-8CI) and Atmos processor costing $4000 (Marantz AV8802), I don't see this happening any time soon. I hope it won't be long till we see at least the processor on the used market.
Plus I'm sure the prices will come down.
Looked again at the prospect for surround in my room, and it's pretty hopeless. Just nowhere to put anything, not anything planar and dipolar and comparable to a true ribbon, anyway. So it may end up being the Mini Maggies, I don't have room for a couch at my listening position so I could just put one on either side of the listening seat. Another possibility would be something like Neo-10's and a Raal, but when would I ever have time to build that? The on-walls just wouldn't work, no way to mount them symmetrically.
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