@MatthiasNYC, on your question to get back muxed material.
I think, I cannot add much more to where you stand.
Wanted to get a better understanding how Atmos (or Auro3D) is using the Top-Speakers with commercially available material.
Did also some indepth analysis, by taking apart Atmos and Auro demo material to PCM. At most, you can get back 8x PCM files (7.1). The differentiated Top-Speaker PCM (x.x.4) is usually included in PCM of the corresponding 7.x.x channel. It cannot be extracted separately - from what I know at least not as of now.
Did dig deeper into this subject. Found, that most likely a “Steganography Approach” is used to reflect in one PCM-File which part of the audio goes to the base speaker and which to the top speaker.
This is done by using two to four LSBs in a 24bit word to encode bottom and top. Auro does it this way. Don’t know yet about Atmos with TrueHD. While doing that, I digged through binaries of Auro PCM-Audio.It seems, that the boundaries or code length for Top vs. Bottom are not static. Did not yet get any further on this.
Yeah, I also don’t think it’s entirely convenient. After all we now live in a world where we’re streaming, so the ability to just dial up a show or movie as a reference and stream it seems like it’ll be a real benefit. My thought about essentially ripping an Atmos BluRay for example was to have reference material that we buy and then play that back to learn in the early stages.
In my situation I’m in a home studio. It works fine for delivering TV content of ‘simple’ shows and I simply want to convert to 7.1.4 (or 5.1.4) initially just to learn both the technical aspect but also the aesthetics. So, since it won’t give me an immediate financial return-on-investment I want to keep costs down.
Now, I need an interface with 16 channel i/o, but even after that with good quality cheaper speakers I’m literally looking at about $3k USD for speakers plus interface. So it just seems a bit silly to spend another $2-3k on just a consumer playback system. One would expect it to be less expensive (or conversely the work gear to be more expensive).
Mattiasnyc for speakers, consider used. A friend of mine tripped across a guy a few hours away that had 24 Event 20/20 bas speakers for sale. Excellent monitoring speaker and quite nice for 7.1.4. My friend completed his studio upgrade already and LOVES them. They were his favorite mixing speaker anyway. I’m a few days away from finishing up mine, but even in stereo these are very nice speakers. And used I got them for about $117 each which was mainly because we took all of them. Usually about 150-175 used which is still good for this level of quality.
Now… if only we had Binaural 3D downmix available, its a very important thing to have since few people own a full home surround system. The Atmos binaural downmix is extremely good. I’ve been using DearVR Pro for that which is pretty good, but not comparable to Atmos binaural.
I already have speakers coming on Tuesday. I went for Kali Audio; 3 x IN-8 for LCR, and for now 2 x LP6 for surround (all on sale). My old set will be “demoted” to ceiling if/when I get a new interface. The IN-8 I’ve had now (stereo) for about 10 days and I really like them. A lot more than I liked the Events last time I heard them… Thanks for the recommendation though.
