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Comment by lowbloodsugar | Hacker News Reader

Sound is the issue for me. Totally happy with the visuals: TV big and close enough to fill my vision. But the sound over streaming is compressed shite. Even when they say "Dolby Atmos", it's a thin Atmos layer over the compressed signal DD+, not Atmos over True HD lossless audio. I suppose, from their perspective, it makes sure I also buy the 4K disk after paying for the movie on streaming.

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As you'll have noticed, Atmos isn't really an audio quality indicator (the way the Dolby Digital trademark was used). Atmos is really just a metadata stream for multidimensional audio panning so a single set of audio streams can be interpreted across many different surround setups.

Hypothetically you'll get a more accurate spatial response, but again as you noted, they tend to just do a surround background bed with a few Atmos objects for voices and explicit sources.

True. But the amount of people who care about that is tiny compared with the masses. For music for example, I'm a happy Qobuz customer because I appreciate hi-res quality and I have the gear to enjoy it, but I know plenty of folks who are just fine with Pandora or Spotify. Same with this. I'd be willing to bet a huge percentage of folks will watch these movies in their mobile.

Yeah. I have lossless Tidal. Pay more for it. Would pay more for lossless movie audio.

The lossless + Atmos tracks are often 3 gigabytes or more by themselves. I'm not sure if you can replicate this in AAC tracks.

Sure. 18Mbit/s for True HD 7.1. Buy I've had at least 50Mbit/s downstream for over five years now.

Same here. No matter what I do my sound won't be as good as a theater, and then there is the source data issue too. That's why I want to see loud movies in theaters.

But for most movies, the sound doesn't matter that much, it's more about the story and characters and visuals.

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