Questions Manual

1
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT DOLBY ATMOS
®
FOR
THE HOME
August 2014
Q: What is Dolby Atmos?
Dolby Atmos
®
is a revolutionary new audio technology that transports you into extraordinary
entertainment experiences.
Fills your room with captivating sound
o Sound comes from all directions, including overhead, to fill the room with
astonishing clarity, richness, detail, and depth.
Puts sounds into motion all around you
o The specific sounds of people, music, and things move all around you in
multidimensional space, so you feel like you are inside the action.
Delivers the full impact of the artist’s work
o Artists have amazing new capabilities to tell their stories, accent their games, or
perform their music to achieve the greatest expressive impact.
Moves your mind, body, and soul
o Sound excites your senses and inspires your emotions, flowing around you and
connecting with you to create a more profoundly moving experience.
Q: How does Dolby Atmos audio work?
Until now, cinema sound designers have had to mix independent sounds together into channels
for soundtrack creation. A discrete sound, such as a helicopter, has been assigned to an
individual channel rather than precisely to where it would occur naturally in the scene. While a
sound can move across channels, there’s no height dimension. For example, you might hear the
helicopter from a side channel and not above you. This approach limits your audio experience
because it can’t come close to matching the way you hear in real life, with sounds coming from
every direction.
Dolby Atmos is the first home theater system that is based not on channels, but on audio
objects. What is an audio object? Any sound heard in a movie scenea child yelling, a helicopter
taking off, a car horn blaringis an audio object. Filmmakers using Dolby Atmos can decide
exactly where those sounds should originate and precisely where they move as the scene
develops.
Thinking about sound in this way eliminates many of the limitations of channel-based audio. In a
channel-based system, filmmakers have to think about the speaker setup: Should this sound
come from the left rear surrounds or the left side surrounds? With Dolby Atmos, filmmakers just
have to think about the story: Where is that yelling child going to run? How will the helicopter
move overhead after takeoff? The Dolby Atmos system, whether in the cinema or a home
theater, has the intelligence to determine what speakers to use to precisely recreate the child’s
movement in the way the filmmakers intend. They can now precisely place and move sounds as
independent objects in multidimensional space, including anywhere overhead, so you can hear
them as you would naturally.
A Dolby Atmos home theater is also far more flexible and adaptable than channel-based home
theater. In a channel-based system with channel-based content, the number of playback

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