Dolby Atmos was just announced back in April 2012 by Dolby Laboratories, a surround sound technology for cinemas that aims to fill the theater hall with immersive sound that’s rich in clarity and depth from all directions, including overhead. The idea is to make it “easy” for filmmakers to place specific sounds anywhere in the theater, and move the sounds around to match the scene, making audiences feel as if they’re part of the movie.
Dolby Atmos in brief
Dolby Atmos builds upon the established Dolby Surround 7.1 and 5.1 technologies, by allowing up to a whopping 128 audio tracks, with up to 64 output speakers in a theater hall. A typical hall can be retrofitted to be Dolby Atmos certified by installing additional side surround, and most importantly, top surround speakers. All these speakers will be then hooked up and grouped into arrays, and the Dolby Atmos system could then feed each speaker its own unique audio feed according to its exact location in the hall.
This lets directors and filmmakers be more expressive and offers them new capabilities to portray the movie’s sounds the way they wanted it to be. Of course, Dolby Atmos is also touted to have the broadest range of sound, so if you put all of this together, imagine a very sharp audio system that gives you crisp sounds like an actress’ whisper, or explosive sounds from the top like when a chopper is flying by.
Dolby Atmos’ adoption
Since the debut of Dolby Atmos in Disney Pixar’s ‘Brave’ back in 2012, the technology has been gaining momentum and is growing faster than even Dolby Digital 5.1. In the first year since the first title release, Dolby Digital 5.1 has 23 titles released, showing in 120+ screens. Dolby Atmos has 31 titles released in over 200 screens in its first year. Today, there are over 275 titles announced to have Dolby Atmos, and more than 1,000 screens installed with or committed to Dolby Atmos, spanning more than 40 countries, and partnering with 250+ exhibitors (including GSC of course).
It was adopted by all major Hollywood studios, major directors — 11 of them have won Academy Awards (including Alfonso Cuarón, Ang Lee, Danny Boyle, J.J. Abrams, Joseph Kosinski, Mark Andrews, and Peter Jackson), 23 Academy Award-winning sound mixers, among other filmmakers. Some of the technical achievement awards won by Dolby Atmos include the ones from the Cinema Audio Society and the Hollywood Post Alliance. Dolby Laboratories is also working closely with Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers to drive the adoption of standards for object-based audio.
Dolby Atmos in Malaysia
A year ago, just two years after the initial announcement, Golden Screen Cinemas (GSC) became the first cinema exhibitor/operator in Malaysia to commit to Dolby Atmos, with the very first setup in 1 Utama — Damansara. It has since expanded to six more GSC outlets: Pavilion — KL, NU Sentral — KL, IOI City Mall — Putrajaya, Ipoh Parade — Ipoh, Gurney Plaza — Penang, and Quill City Mall — Penang.
The GSC ticket price for Dolby Atmos varies, and for the 1 Utama outlet (Hall 3), it could go from as low as RM9.50 for just the Dolby Atmos experience before noon on a Wednesday, up to a whopping RM39.50 per ticket for the best experience (Dolby Atmos, 3D, DBOX, premium leather seat) during peak hours. Ticket prices at Pavilion are even higher.
I should also mention that neither Cathay Cineplex nor TGV Cinemas use Dolby Atmos at the moment, and only GSC Cinemas are adopting this system in Malaysia.
Dolby Atmos first impressions
At week or so ago, the folks at Dolby were kind enough to invite us for a screening of ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ to showcase the prowess of its Dolby Atmos system. At 1 Utama’s GSC, I believe only Hall 3 has Dolby Atmos installed, and if memory serves, there are around six speakers behind, and eight more on each side, that are visible. I couldn’t see any overhead speakers, except the ones hanging above the screen.
At the end of the movie, Dolby asked us about our thoughts on how the Atmos system sounded. Not to my surprise, Najib of The Skop, Nigel of The Hyped Geek, and I, all corroborated on the fact that it sounded not any different from your regular Dolby Surround 7.1 or 5.1 theater. In fact, there is little to none distinctive sounds that come from above, and most of the time, the loudest sounds are always projected from the front speakers.
What’s funny, before the movie began, there was a demo video by GSC highlighting this very feature, and in this video there was a helicopter flying by and the sound appears as if it is really flying overhead. In fact, that was the best Dolby Atmos experience we’ve ever had — from the demo video, and not during the movie.
There could be several reasons why our Dolby Atmos experience was so lackluster. From the get-go, the movie audio may not have been mixed to fully utilize Dolby Atmos. Perhaps the sound engineers at GSC 1 Utama did not mix and balance the audio output right, for that occasion. Or maybe an action movie with lots of destruction like ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ is just not the right movie enjoy Dolby Atmos.
Update (May 8th 7pm): I also asked Vinot who has also recently watched Avengers on Dolby Atmos on a separate occasion, and again, he also corroborated that the sound wasn’t any different from a regular surround sound using channel-based audio.
My initial impressions notwithstanding, I’d still recommend you give it a go at your nearest GSC Cinema that has Dolby Atmos, for you to compare your experience with conventional cinema surround sound, and judge for yourself.
If you want to be kept up to date with the latest Dolby Atmos titles, do visit: http://dolby.com/atmosmovies. You can also find the white paper and specifications of Dolby Atmos here: http://www.dolby.com/us/en/technologies/cinema/dolby-atmos.html.
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