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fxtentacle

Yes, Dolby won. By being cheap to implement.

I used to work in this space and I've dealt with:

- Barco Auro 3D

- Frauenhofer MPEG-H

- Dolby Atoms

- DTS:X

The idea behind Auro3D is to just use a lot of discrete channels, which is great for cinemas with a static playback architecture, but there's no way to adjust the mixing based on the listener's speaker setup. So it is difficult to make sound great for home use unless you have lots of space to hang things on your ceiling. (5 top speakers needed)

MPEG-H can do everything but it's difficult to configure and was fully specified very late, after Dolby Atmos was already in production. That said, this is the agreed-upon default standard for broadcast, because it supports stuff like 200 language-independent 3D objects + 5 language-dependent voice actor tracks, all positioned in 3D. MPEG-H can also be converted easily to Dolby Atmos and DTS:X.

Many professionals agree that DTS:X is the best quality consumer option. It also theoretically supports quite a lot of customization. But ASIC implementations tend to freeze those because otherwise it's too expensive. And it still is expensive.

Dolby Atmos virtualization is said by gossip to be a few 32-tap IIR filters with delay modules in between. That means it's by far the lowest-tech solution on the list. And that means cheap ASIC implementations. I believe this is why Atmos won.

If I remember correctly, DTS:X is a $4 chip, Atmos is a $0.5 chip.

View on HN

Do you have an email that I can contact you? I run a headphones magazine, Headphonesty and I will love to publish an article on this topic.

This post is me reciting rumors about what I've heard of how things worked and how things played out. I'm not sure that I'm a good source for an article and I can't really officially confirm anything, even if I know it to be correct.

Your best option is probably to email virtual interview questions to Tom Ammermann, the CEO of https://newaudiotechnology.com/ He's a great guy, Granny-nominated sound engineer, and has been working on 3D sound with all those technologies for a long time.

Is there any example of a technologically superior and higher quality option winning over a cheap and simple one? (In media recording and replay, at least).

This seems to happen again and again, with the cheap and simple option always winning.

The audio CD surpassed sales of vinyl records and cassettes. CDs arguably offer better sound (subjective I know) over vinyl and cassettes.

I'm going out on a limb here but wouldn't CD's be both cheaper and simpler to manufacture too?

You're probably correct. That means the audio CD offered cheaper manufacture and superior sound. (Vinyl lovers will dispute the superior sound claims.)

Call CD sound "more accurate". Vinyl lovers historically loved vinyl precisely because they love the particular inaccuracy it imparts. CDs are more accurate. Brutally so at times, even. Especially when they're being really, really accurate at conveying clipping brought on by the loudness wars.

(Now I suspect vinyl's main purpose in life is as a marker of being a discriminating consumer who doesn't want to be a victim of the loudness war, since you can't overdrive a vinyl record in the same way for physical reasons. It is unfortunate that one must go to such measures to opt out of "music that sounds like crap because you ruined it, you stupid music companies".)

Not in 1982. CD players were very expensive to manufacture and buy and making discs was harder too. Over time it got cheaper because a potato could do the decoding and the lasers got cheap and economies of scale allowed it. But at first it was very expensive, discs cost like twice as much as vinyl albums.

A record player is mechanically and electrically much simpler. And vinyl disks are just pressed vinyl. You can buy a toy kit to build a record player, a CD player is just too complicated.

> You can buy a toy kit to build a record player, a CD player is just too complicated.

you don't need a toy kit, to get sound of a vinyl. but yes it's basically impossible to build a laser and tech to read cd-da and than get audio from it...

well there is https://www.theaudioeagle.com/columns/column07.html but you need a dac and a cdm device, vinyl only needs paper and pencil (fun fact a guy from r&d of dts showed that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaqmdcaF87w)

Apparently vinyl records have now surpassed CDs in sales.

https://qz.com/2111339/vinyl-outsold-cds-in-the-us-for-the-f...

Not for any practical reason, though. CDs were the epitome of practical. They're not vintage enough for them to be cool yet. Give it a while longer and CDs will have fallen so far out of the public eye that they'll become a niche once again and people will be scouring to find old 98 Degrees CDs.

Don't CDs have relatively short shelf lives? Not as bad as floppies, but still -- will people be able to take 50 year old CDs and spin them up?

Recordable ones use dyes which fade if exposed to sunlight and temperature.

The pits that represent data in factory manufactured discs are laser etched, so if the polycarbonate layer doesn't decay in 50 years it should be OK. Betting they would as long as kept from moisture. Even if the reflective layer is compromised I think it would somehow be possible to reapply it to the polycarbonate layer which has the pits.

Below is an excerpt from https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/sec4/#:~:text=Among....:

CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs are similar in that they are replicated discs-that is, the data are physically pressed into the disc when it is manufactured. ROMs are generally mass-produced and contain music, video, computer applications, or interactive games.

ROM disc longevity is determined by the extent to which its aluminum layer is exposed to oxygen. Oxygen, including pollutants, can migrate through the polycarbonate layer or the hard lacquer layer (CD label side and edge), carried in by moisture. Oxygen or moisture can more easily penetrate through scratches, cracks, or delaminated areas in the label. Oxygen can also be trapped inside the disc during manufacturing, although manufacturing improvements have reduced the likelihood of this.

If left in a very humid environment, moisture-and oxygen-will eventually reach the aluminum, causing it to lose its reflectivity. The normally shiny aluminum, which resembles silver, becomes oxide-dull and much less reflective, like the color of a typical aluminum ladder. The combination of high humidity and increased temperatures will accelerate the oxidation rate.

The life expectancy of a ROM disc therefore depends on the environmental conditions to which it is exposed over time. Generally, it is best to keep ROM discs in a dry, cool environment. If the disc is removed from a humid, hot environment to an ideal condition before damage has been done, it will “dry out” and should be as playable as if it had been kept in ideal conditions all along. Other contaminates, however, such as inks, solvents, and pollutants, have the potential to irreversibly penetrate and to deform, discolor, or corrode the disc, causing permanent reading problems for the laser.

Commercially manufactured CDs have an extremely long shelf life, assuming they are properly handled and not exposed to UV light or extreme conditions. They will probably outlive you. Short shelf life is mainly an issue with cheap CD-R and DVD-R recordable media. The dyes tend to decay over time.

I don't know that compact discs were more expensive to produce than vinyl or cassettes. I'm sure they were at first, but costs must have come down drastically by the time you could buy big spools of RW+ CDs at Best Buy for $20.

CDs are smaller than vinyl records, so that brings down shipping costs. From a consumer's perspective vinyl records require a lot of maintenance: needles need to be changed, records should be kept free from dust.

Cassettes are small, but complicated. I wouldn't be surprised if cassettes are more expensive to produce than compact discs. It is interesting that while CDs overtook cassette tapes in the 90's (aside from mixed tapes shared between friends), Laser Discs didn't become more popular than VHS until DVDs. Maybe the difference in visual quality wasn't worth the effort to switch media until televisions became larger larger and sharper.

> more expensive

There's pressing a flat circle in a factory somewhere, and there's

- printing album art, making sleeves, etc.

- storage

- distribution

- retail space

- "shrinkage" (ok, stealing a CD is easier)

- ... ?

Ipod over walkman?

Can someone seriously explain why this is getting downvotes?

On HN it's generally considered bad form to dispute downvotes.

IMHO there's nothing wrong with your original comment, except perhaps brevity. Maybe somebody was of the opinion that you needed to make the argument that a Walkman is simpler than an iPod.

I’m not deep enough into the culture to know whether disputing, or simply asking for explanation, of a downvote is “bad form”, but i would bet that using downvotes as an alternative to a cogent rebuttal is considered “worse form”. And there’s no way to counter it except to do as gp did and call it out, asking for explanation. Unfortunately the downvoter is unlikely to ever offer an explanation. So the gp and others like him (myself at times) relies on the crowd to figure out whether or not there’s a misunderstanding. Discouraging that, when the downvote is seemingly arbitrary, doesn’t help the situation at all.

How else can a downvoted commenter, and bystanders, learn?

Thanks for understanding. Not disputing it, just bothering to understand if I can.

Disclaimer: didn’t downvote.

Because it contrasts something from 1979 with something from 2001 and fails to explain how this is a relevant example for the discussion.

> technologically superior and higher quality option winning over a cheap and simple one

It was a direct answer to that question, and IMO a good one. Some in this thread appear to feel that we inexorably move towards a disposable culture, and this is a clear counterexample.

How is directly answering a question with a counterexample not contributing to the discussion? I shouldn't be so annoyed at this, but I admit that I am.

"Technologically superior" is kind of relative to comparison group. As a consumer who does not enjoy particularly high salary, "is it affordable" is an important consideration when buying any technological product.

What do I mean when I say "relative to"? When DVD became available, people bought DVD players, which were superior to VHS. And TV+VHS was a superior technology compared TV alone. And TV displays have become much better than they were when VHS was brand new.

Blu-ray over hd DVD is the first thing that comes to mind

Not really "winning" per se, but lossless audio is fortunately seeing an improvement over the last few years. It's become a minor selling point on online streaming services (Spotify, Apple music, Deezer etc all provide some level of lossless music). Services like Tidal explicitly advertise themselves as high quality. Apparently as long as you can market it people will buy it and it will improve :')

(See also: improvements in audio sstreaming codecs to Bluetooth headphones in the last few years)

Spotify has nothing lossless in offer (yet)

Sorry, my bad. I mainly use Deezer (which has FLAC).

I think you need to caveat that as within the same timeframe, lots of examples people are coming up with is technology coming out AFTER - blu ray triumphed over dvd because it was a later and better technology. CD triumphed over tapes in the same way and neither of these examples were cheaper when they first came out.

Bluray did decisively win over its contemporary rival HD-DVD.

Was Bluray technologically superior and more expensive? I don't remember that being the case, but it may have been. I think the ubiquity of the PS3 was the decider for that generation, so I guess, if it was more expensive, it's a decent example.

Bluray was generally superior yes. It wasn't flat out better in all ways, but it was at least on parity if not better to HD-DVD. Cost wise, it depends on what exactly we're talking about (Cost of disc, cost of licensing, etc), but blu ray succeeded largely due to Sony willing to take an estimated ~$3B loss on the hardware sales of the PS3 and leverage it's media partnerships to see the format succeed in the long term. Selling the PS3 at a deficit was instrumental in getting BluRay players into peoples homes en-masse, which then in turn allowed Sony to better negotiate media partners to use their format.

So was it cheaper? No, I don't think so, but Sony was willing to eat a loss to make it "cheaper" for the end consumer. Technically, people paid more for a bluray than for an HD-DVD player, as a PS3 was definitely more expensive than a standalone player/drive for either, but the value proposition was definitely there, as many people wanted a PS3 regardless.

In short, the value was there, both for the media companies and end consumers, for bluray as opposed to HD-DVD, but I'm not sure it was explicitly "cheaper".

HD DVD was released with the xbox 360 by Microsoft earlier than Sony's PS3, so that value proposition goes both ways. HD DVD was cheaper too. The number of consoles sold isn't that different (Sony sold ca. 15% more over the entire lifetime of the console).

At the time there were many claims that the porn industry would be the deciding factor.

Being earlier doesn't mean it has a better value proposition. It just means it had an opportunity for entrenchment before a competitor can bring their product to market. Had they successfully leveraged that opportunity, that would be valuable, but they didn't. Microsoft/HD-DVD decidedly squandered that opportunity considering the PS3 (primary BR player purchased pre 2010) launched a year later than Xbox but had sold as many units in ~1 yr as the xbox had in 2, effectively eliminating any such market advantage in it's first year.

> HD DVD was cheaper.

Correct. Which is why my comment talked about value, and why "X is cheaper" as an individual metric in and of itself is not useful in measuring success. BR and the PS3 was decidedly more expensive. People still bought more of them than HD-DVD/360.

> At the time there were many claims that the porn industry would be the deciding factor.

Which was almost as laughable then as it is now.

You claimed the reason why Blu Ray won was mostly because it was bundled with the PS3. I counterclaimed by saying that HD DVD had the same advantage. PS3 sold about 87.3 million while xbox 360 sold about 84 million, the difference is not that much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons...

edit: It looks like my claim was not correct, a HD DVD accessory was required to play HD DVD content on the xbox 360.

Yeah, if the 360 had included an internal HD-DVD drive at the same price point we might be somewhere very different.

(Thought to be honest BluRay would probably still have won as dual-format drives based on BluRay appeared later).

"a HD DVD accessory was required to play HD DVD content on the xbox 360."

Once again demonstrating the murderously huge difference between hardware that ships with the platform and attempts to add on hardware to the install base later.

Exceptions will leap to mind, like the rumble pack for the N64 or the Dualshock controller, but in general, add-on attempts fail and fail miserably for gaming consoles. They don't leap to mind precisely because they failed.

> You claimed the reason why Blu Ray won was mostly because it was bundled with the PS3

And Sony's partnerships with media companies, yes. Both of these are true.

> PS3 sold about 87.3 million while xbox 360 sold about 84 million

I was referring to sales when xbox been on the market twice as long (2 years) as the PS3 (1 year) at calendar end (2007). If the 360 had an early-to-market advantage, it became irrelevant real quick and never recovered that sales advantage in any meaningful way once a competitor emerged. [1]

> a HD DVD accessory was required to play HD DVD content on the xbox 360.

Yes. Further cements what I was saying about the PS3 being instrumental in BR taking over HD-DVD as a consumer entertainment format. it also further highlights my original point of how "cheaper" doesn't necessarily mean better value, or better selling, or better adaption. There's more to it than "first" or "cheapest". BR/PS3 were more expensive and later to market than their HD-DVD/360 counterparts, and yet both when on to be as successful if not more so than their cheaper first-to-market rivals. The original question of this thread is how important "cheap" is to a technology attaining success. This is a clear example of "it doesn't". There are plenty of instances however where it absolutely helped. This was just an instance where it did not, or at least, not enough to outweigh other factors against it.

1. https://www.vgchartz.com/tools/hw_date.php?reg=Global&ending...

EDIT: Changed 2017 to 2007 because oops, holy hell it's been 15 years since PS3 launch?! I'm old ffs

HD-DVD was released as an add-on to the Xbox 360, external to the internal DVD drive. The internal DVD drive could not play HD-DVD movies.

Sony's PS3 had the bluray player internally, as part of the base spec.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_HD_DVD_Player

It looks like it was released just days before the PS3 anyways.

EDIT: We both seem to have posted this bit of information at the same time. Sorry!

Yeah it seems I am misremembering things. I found out around the same time as you but thank you for taking the time to clear this up anyway.

Did HD-DVD use Java like Blue-Ray? To this day I found it absurd that they require publishers to ship a Java application along with the content. It is probably the reason there are so many lousy menus. 4K UHD is even worse as many publishers have downright just given up. Everyone is using the same sample code. At least DVD did something interesting when it was released.

I don't know if this is a problem that can be solved. The framework has to accomodate the lowest common denominator and you know some manufacturer will cut costs to the bone so you can't mandate some fancy graphics chip in the spec because it will kill the format before it can become the standard. Is this why they went with Java?

TBF to 4k UHD, the 4k stream is already being compressed significantly on those discs so every byte that doesn't go to content means that that you are compromising the content just a little bit more.

That's also why so many 4k UHD discs don't have any bonus content on them and usually pack a Blu-Ray in.

Really? I rip 4K UHD so I can toss the disc and their crap software in the attic and typically I get 60-80GB per movie. From what I understand, these are 100GB discs right? Are they seriously cutting corners on the quality? If this is the case, now I am royally pissed. I am paying a premium to avoid the Netflix/Streaming compressed garbage and to know that they cut corners here when the whole point is about uncompromised quality...well that is just another blow to any shred of trust I have in these companies.

I mean, the RAW 4k (or 6k or 8k) footage is typically multiple terabytes (almost 15 TB for 2 hours at 8k). That is then compressed down to under a Terabyte for use in the movie theater (typically 200-800GB depending on features and length), and then compressed further to get it onto 100 GB disc. It's important to remember that length is going to play a big part (there is a reason that Snyders Justice League is on 2 discs) and a consistent quality is going to be desired within a catalog.

Yeah it seems like they are not doing their due diligence in terms of codec and compression strategies being used. Obviously we are not going to get uncompressed data(although that would be a dream one day that would probably never happen as resolution will increase with new storage capacities) but I do wonder if they can choose different compression strategies depending on the film. It they are charging premium prices I feel as if it is their responsibility to put in the effort to deliver the best experience that the format is capable of delivering. Otherwise what "value add" is the publisher actually delivering?

Just because something is compressed doesn't mean it's low fidelity. If you're so concerned about your high quality viewing, you should probably spend a few minutes learning the basics. How exactly do you expect 4k@24fps 32 bit color raw to fit in 100GB?

Did HD-DVD use Java like Blue-Ray?

No, that was one of the value propositions to HD-DVD: you don't need to update your disc player in order to watch your new movie. Which apparently was a common occurrence in the early days, in that your player needed an update before your player can play that latest release. HD-DVD users were like, "why does a DVD player need an Ethernet port? Uh, oh..."

HD-DVD's menu software was built primarily by Microsoft and didn't require Java or even support Java. It's menu system was loosely HTML-based XML with some support for CSS-like stylesheets and optional Javascript. Just about everything a movie menu needs (including support for rich animations) could be done entirely declaratively and JS scripting was entirely optional (and rarely used/needed).

It could have been cheaper than Java runtimes needed by Blu-Ray players, but one of the requirements they decided they needed in the menus was live previews of movie content and that wanted multiple active streams of video decompression. These days Blu-Rays fake it with effectively just using animated GIFs in the Java menus, but HD-DVD menus would actually play the movie in things like scene thumbnails (which was neat, but maybe unnecessary). Needing hardware that supported multiple active streams of video decompression to support that is often considered the big reason HD-DVD wasn't cheaper than Blu-Ray especially given the licensing costs and expense of BD-J Java systems.

Thats fascinating! Thank you for the history! It would be cool to see the best implementation of this JS based system however I feel like it would suffer from the some of the same problems as the Java system: namely with so many vendors, how can you ensure that each implementation will contain a robust JS rendering engine? Feels like that would just lead to publishers using off the shelf templates that do the bare minimum as we are seeing on Blueray.

How would the HD-DVD laser cope with having to read multiple streams? or does it read it ahead of time and just cache it somehow? One of the biggest annoyances of DVD was the fact that some player implementation had horrific seek times and so the menu transitions were mind numbingly slow.

I wish they would have watched AVGN's comedic take on DVD and Blu-Ray formats and just created a format that met all those specifications. Have you seen these videos?

Warning: Swear words

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsdzaEVeFEE

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tetXKdi9U3c

> It would be cool to see the best implementation of this JS based system however I feel like it would suffer from the some of the same problems as the Java system: namely with so many vendors, how can you ensure that each implementation will contain a robust JS rendering engine?

Like I said the primary rendering engine was primarily XML driven and XML-based. So far as I'm aware the only implementation in HD-DVD's history was Microsoft's (which was a small complaint among the hardware vendors that there was only one firmware for the "base OS" of HD-DVD players), and it was incredibly performant (because it wasn't using scripting to run animations and such). It supported JS for scripting, but that scripting was almost never used in the vast majority of disc menus, and it was probably a very bare JS engine at that and never needed to guarantee performance. The JS could be under-powered because it was an optional add-on for small bits of interactivity like "games and quizzes", it was not driving hardly anything in day-to-day menus. Think "early days of the web" (or maybe HN itself): almost everything is basic HTML and JS is used sparingly for a minimum for just a small subset of interactive features. But if you built an HTML specifically to be a nicely animated Table of Contents for a movie and had years of DVD movie menus to compare for best practices.

> How would the HD-DVD laser cope with having to read multiple streams? or does it read it ahead of time and just cache it somehow? One of the biggest annoyances of DVD was the fact that some player implementation had horrific seek times and so the menu transitions were mind numbingly slow.

Good questions. I'm not as much a hardware person as a software person, so I don't know the answers beyond that I just recall the approach chosen by the HD-DVD standard was considered expensive in contrast to DVD or to Blu-Ray hardware standards at the time. As a user of HD-DVD, there was some noticeable seek lag in the menus, as I recall, but it was kind of magic when it worked.

  Was Bluray technologically superior and more expensive?

It wasn't really superior, in some ways it was better (more capacity per layer) but then lost out by using less efficient codec's, and requiring a significantly more powerful processor to run java rather than having a custom scripting/overlay function while lacking various features (like networking). Much of what HD-DVD had out of the box didn't manage to make it into the bluray specs until a couple years later (revision 2.0 IIRC https://www.cnet.com/culture/blu-ray-profile-1-0-1-1-2-0-exp...).

Some things never made it, like the fact that HD-DVD was region free. The PS3 was a contributing factor but a minor one, In what basically was a studio fight over consumer friendliness (DRM, region locking, backwards compatibility with DVDs since they could be pressed on the backside, instant play requirements, etc), and which camp was willing to pay larger bribes to "win" before the dual mode players became the majority since the later hardware requirements for bluray made it basically capable of also playing HD-DVDs. Plus, streaming was becoming an ever more present topic.

To this day, the bluray experience tends to be worse than HD-DVD as so few blurays ever behaved like HD-DVD (universal iirc being the notable exception since they appear to have ported their HD-DVD interfaces to bluray for a while) when it comes to just playing the movie when the disk is inserted and overlaying menus over the movie as its playing.

> but then lost out by using less efficient codec's

They used the same codecs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_high-definition_...

Now they do, but originally all the blurays were mpeg2, it was part of the discussion around quality, and the vc1 codec was used on most HDDVDs vs MPEG2 on blurays nullifying the bitrate differences. IIRC of course, since i'm lazy.

No, you're wrong. The first blu-ray players had support for all those codecs. The first few mastered blu-ray discs were MPEG-2 encoded, but that was because the encoders were more mature at that point.

https://www.avsforum.com/threads/sony-on-mpeg-2-for-blu-ray....

Re: Universal menus: they may have ported all their animations and the general look and feel, but there are some strong differences to how the menus functioned on HD-DVD. They animated smoothly on top of the video itself on HD-DVD and in Java they fake that on some movies and stopped trying altogether after a few years. (On some players it's very much the opposite of smooth, it has very clear hiccups and clipping artifacts.) Plus the loss of things like picture-in-picture special features that HD-DVD supported but Blu-Ray never did.

Dolby Atmos virtualization is said by gossip to be a few 32-tap IIR filters

FIR, right? That's crazy long for an IIR filter.

They are trying to model ~1s of total reverb time for the headphone case, so I'd consider a 32-tap FIR way too short. 32-tap IIR sounds highly numerically unstable, but appropriate to me.

What's your perspective on Ambisonics?

It was dead on arrival for movies, because everyone is used to working with (and tweaking) discrete channels. That's why MPEG-H and Auros were successful there, because you could just use your existing 10.1 content, add some top speakers, and call it 3D cinema. Also interference between speakers is a real thing for cinemas and you hire expensive professionals to measure your room and tweak per-speaker FIR filters. With Ambisonics, all channels are kinda correlated by default, which makes getting rid of interference more difficult.

But the UE5 implementation is very promising, both performance- and quality-wise: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/native-soundfield-am...

My personal opinion is that Ambisonics will be the future for games on headphones, but not gain much traction elsewhere. I mean, Dolby Atmos is "good enough" for pretty much everywhere and once you reach its limits, MPEG-H is there to cover those last weird 1% of cinema and TV usecases.

And yet they get away with highway murder at the prices they charge to "experience" Atmos. Everything in this world is a rip off isn't it. Thanks for this background, it is fascinating.

On a side note: I have always like how the traditional DTS tracks sounded compared to Dolby, I always thought it was just me being weird but maybe there is something to it.

I don't get this, especially on a website like HN where so many of us build software where the marginal cost approaches zero.

It isn't about the cost of implementation, it is about the value added. If you don't want Atmos, don't pay for it. There are plenty of high quality sound systems that don't have Atmos compat.

I was referring more to Cinema(although it applies to home market as well). I want to pay for the best experience and I think a lot of people are expecting the very best when they pay $20+ for a Dolby "Premium" experience. If they don't know any better, then they think it is best money can buy.

Furthermore, if there was an option for these others in the market that a consumer could easily buy then I would understand your line of reasoning but most movies are authored with Atmos and so you must buy that system if you want to take advantage of the additional content offered on your favorite movie disc. It would be nice if the film was offered in multiple formats(even on the same disc).

You would think that if all this additional money would be spent, then you might as well ensure it is the very best experience. Instead as the author shows, they are still cutting corners despite charging this price. It is a scam they pull in multiple markets.

I don't think the vast majority of movie goers are able to tell the difference between Atmos and DTS:X. It's almost certainly a case of the marginal value of going from Atmos to DTS:X doesn't make it worth the cost of going from one format to another. Consider also if there was a difference between the audio master technique for Cinema and Home, it just would increase the cost further.

Atmos is pretty good, far better than what was previously readily available.

We had 70mm IMAX which got dropped to Imax Digital(LieMax) and now dropped to Atmos(It is debatable which is better). If they were capable of delivering a certain level of quality and cannot anymore either the value of the dollar has fallen so much that they cannot provide the same quality for the same price(possible) or they are cutting corners somewhere. It is probably a mixture of both.

>I don't think the vast majority of movie goers are able to tell the difference between Atmos and DTS:X.

It does not matter, they are advertising this medium as the best possible movie going experience and charging premium prices reflecting this claim. The fact that it is not worth it to "them" to provide the best experience is a result of them deciding that they want a specific profit margin and will fit as much as they can within that margin.

The audio gear market has always been full of bullshit marketing shenanigans and overpricing. Probably since the first caveman figured out acoustics.

Because almost all of the profit is in the premium for branding, so advertising has a better ROI than research.

Just out of curiosity: Is there some way for consumers to "open" a Atmos soundtrack and see what speakers are outputting sound? I remember seeing some tool that visualizes the speakers as the soundtrack is playing. Is it also possible to edit this and re-compile it back into a finished atmos soundtrack?

I ask because I have this 2010s film that was "re-released" in atmos that has a missing sound effect in a specific scene and despite my attempts to reach out to the studio and director, I cannot seem to get ahold of them. My next thing would be to try and re-add the sound effect back into the atmos soundtrack. Is this possible?

If I recall rightly, this is why VHS beat out the higher quality Betamax back in the day of video tapes - it was cheaper to produce using VHS so everything was on VHS. Because everything was on VHS, that was what people bought and the higher quality Betamax lost enough market to survive.

It's a shame that the higher quality product isn't always what wins and kind of says something about our Walmart approach to life.

A central limitation of Betamax that is rarely mentioned is that the tapes were too short to fit very long movies on them; see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Videotape_format_...

"While VHS machines' lower retail price was eventually a major factor, the principal battleground proved to be recording time. The original Sony Betamax video recorder for the NTSC television system could record for only 60 minutes, identical to the previous U-matic format, which had been sufficient for use in television studios. JVC's VHS could manage 120 minutes, followed by RCA's entrance into the market with a 240-minute recorder using VHS. These challenges sparked a mini-war to see who could achieve the longest recording time."

We've all collectively fallen for Sony's marketing for Betamax. It was not clearly higher quality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oJs8-I9WtA

Considering beta 2 matches VHS's LP, the quality advantages of Betamax may have simply been that beta 1 just used more tape per minute of recording time.

popularity is expensive. people want quality, and generally arent happy to sacrifice it. but the diminishing returns hits way harder and faster for the common person than a hobbyist typically wants to accept.

popularity is also skewed young. income is skewed old. VHS was a much better fit as a lowest common denominator. If a product is trying to be a popular medium, cheap is necessary.

That said, once the medium is established - people will still happily pay a lot for a high quality product within the medium. iPhone popularity is a good example of this. People bought expensive VHS players with bells and whistles too.

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