Atmos Music Yet?

Inconvenient time for AWS to be down, certainly.  :)

As advertised....

Amazon Dolby atmos, It is really amazing. I have an arc plus sub plus 2xplay1 and it sounds supreme. Especially classical music.

All amazing - unless you live in a country where you can have a subscription to Amazon Music Unlimited (for more than three years now!!) but simply cannot add it as a music service in the S2 app since Sonos and Amazon only play nice together in selected countries. And since Amazon has no ‘Amazon connect’ function like Spotify you can only stream through airplay, which tada does not support Atmos. Very disappointing

That sucks. Is there not a workaround?

I haven’t found it yet 

Google is your friend

is your country on the way to be listed as one of the Amazon unlimited countries?

..

Completely agree.  I had tried out atmos music previously with Tidal and I really wasn’t that impressed.  It seemed like a gimmick that just felt weird rather than an improved experience.  However, I don’t get the same impression for the tracks I heard through  Amazon.  Instead of using atmos to have audio come from strange places, it seemed like it was actually used to make the sound stage feel bigger and more encompassing.  

Also agree that the effect is a lot more useful on tracks that are designed for bigger sound, such as classical music.  Rock and pop songs that have few instruments and a smaller range won’t see that much improvement.  As an example of tracks that worked, I liked Musgraves’s “star crossed” a lot.  Blondie’s “call me” didn’t really gain much from atmos. 

Admittedly, some of this could be because I’m used to the way certain older songs are supposed to sound in stereo, and thus my brain is confused/disturbed when it doesn’t sound right.   That could also explain why I wasn’t as impressed with Tidal.  

I used to think that atmos music was just going to be a passing fad.  Don’t think so now, but it will be slow growth as tracks are recorded in atmos, and people have hardware to play atmos.  It will never replace stereo though as the atmos effect is immediately lost when you step away from the listening area, much more so that with stereo.  It’s great when I plan on staying in the listening area, but not so much if I am moving around.  As well, I don’t think atmos works as well at lower volumes.

If you really want to experience what Dolby Atmos music is capable of, check out Kraftwerk’s 3-D The Catalogue album. It’s electronic, avant-garde music from Germany but well worth a listen. The entire album is incredibly immersive with A LOT of height channel and surround activity. A highlight is the final 14-minute track, “Tour de France / Prologue / Etape 1 / Chrono / Etape 2”.