Chapter EIGHT - CINEMA, HOME CINEMA & THE RISE OF DOLBY ATMOS

This page contains examples for the book Immersive Spatial Sound.

Chapter 1 - How We Create A 3D Soundscape Of The World | Chapter 2 - Binaural Sound | Chapter 3 - Using Binaural Sound In Audio Drama | Chapter 4 - Using Binaural Sound In Theatre | Chapter 5 - Ambisonics, Dynamic Binaural Sound & 360° Films | Chapter 6 - VR, AR, MR & Game Audio Technology | Chapter 7 - Loudspeaker Spatialisation | Chapter 8 - Cinema, Home Cinema & The Rise Of Dolby Atmos | Chapter 9 - Spatial Audio For Music Production | Chapter 10 - Theatre & Concerts

Please wear headphones when listening to these examples.

Before you start listening to examples, check your headphones are working properly by playing this audio clip.

Sound Check
Gareth Fry

  • There is a little known issue with Bluetooth headphones/headsets. If you are using a set of wireless/Bluetooth headphones, and you select to also use that as the microphone in your teleconferencing software (Zoom, Meet, Teams, Skype, etc) then all audio in your headphones will change from stereo to mono, and is reduced to a really low quality 8kHz sample rate. This is because the Bluetooth data bandwidth is quite low, so if you’re not using the mic built in to your headphones, all that data can be used to provide high quality stereo audio; but if you use the mic, half that data is used for the microphone, and only half the data is then available for the headphone audio. This is a feature of Bluetooth itself, so this applies to Mac’s and PC;s, desktops and tablets, cheap Bluetooth headphones and the most expensive Apple headsets.

    You can test this:

    • connect some bluetooth headphones to your computer.

    • close all applications.

    • listen to this track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnzIIhLNHqg

    • it should sound super high quality, very stereo and lovely.

    • Now, open up Zoom or Meet or Teams, and start a new meeting, with the Mic input set to your bluetooth headphones

    • You should instantly hear the audio in your headphones flatten into mono, and reduce in audio quality to about 10% of what it was.

    You can get round this by using wired headphones, Bluetooth headphones that don’t have a built-in mic (quite rare these days) or by using your Bluetooth headphones and selecting to use the build-in computer microphone rather than the headphones’s microphone.

    And yes, it does apply to AirPods too.

A small 7.1 cinema sound system

Click to zoom-in

A large 7.1 cinema sound system

A small Dolby Atmos cinema sound system

A large Dolby Atmos cinema sound system

PAGE 123 - CREATING THE STEAM TRAIN EXAMPLE IN LOGIC PRO’S DOLBY ATMOS SYSTEM

Video

You can download this Logic session to experiment with yourself. It is set for binaural playback over headphones.

PAGE 125 - WHY ISN’T FILM DIALOGUE RECORDED WITH AN AMBISONIC OR BINAURAL MIC?

There are lots of reasons not to record film dialogue with a binaural or ambisonic mic, but that’s not to say it’s not impossible or without benefits. The demo below compares recording dialogue in a noisy environemnt at various distances using various microphones: a Sennheisr MKH416 shotgun mic, a radio mic, a binaural head and an ambisonic mic.

We can hear from the demo that the KU100 binaural head, by design, records a lot of the environmental noise, which is great in some circumstances, but if we’re only interested in the dialogue, it’s not so great!

We can use software like Harpex to create a virtual shotgun mic from the Ambeo mic that sounds almost identical to an MKH416. An ambisonic mic can be electrically noisier than a shotgun mic, and of course the sound team have to deal with at least 4 channels of recordings for an ambisonic recording, rather than just a single channel from an MKH416.

The radio mic gives us a recording with the least amount of background noise, as in many camera shots it can be closer than any other microphone, but it’s sound is affected by where on the body it is placed, and any costume that is being worn too. Many productions will hide the radio mic capsule other a layer of clothing, compromising its sound. Some higher budget productions prefer to avoid this compromise in sound, and instead they will use CGI to remove the mic capsule from the shot in post production.