An Opinion: Dolby Atmos Music Streamed vs Disc

 For me Atmos is my preference.  That’s due to the music I enjoy the most.  I’m into modern classical, orchestral.  An orchestra in Atmos sounds so much larger.  Is it as detailed as played through my KEF LS 50 Wireless 2 speakers… NO, but it is more realistic in its presentation through the Sonos surround setup.  If Sonos set the surround steering to include front 300s it would sound even better.

Great write-up — totally agree that Atmos shines most with dense, layered mixes rather than straight-ahead tracks. Prince is a perfect example, and it’s interesting you noticed the disc version pulling ahead of streaming. Also +1 on disabling Speech Enhancement for music; it really does clean things up.

To be honest, with surround music you really need matched speaker drivers all round which is impossible in a Sonos setup as it stands. Our ears are much less easily fooled than our eyes and when the same instrument pans around different speakers that aren’t matched for things like timbre we notice it as a bit off. 

In a properly matched setup, surround music can sound amazing, but as with any recordings, the quality of the mix is quite variable. Much of the stuff being touted as Atmos has come from SACD/DVD-A mixes  and has not been specifically mixed from scratch. You know what these companies are like for re-using assets 😉 There were a lot of these for classical music. 

What’s not clear to me on the streamed Atmos stuff is whether or not it’s a lossless stream. Discs usually are. Dolby tend to use little tricks on lossy compression that again, don’t matter so much on film soundtracks, but do start to show up on music. 

For a Jazz sampler, you might want to see if you can find a Blu-ray called Legends of Jazz Showcase with Ramsey Lewis. It has video too, but sounds great. 

Starting off, my ears are pretty bad these days.

When comparing a CD quality stereo stream to an Atmos stream (aside from mixing issues) I'm hard pressed to hear a quality difference. The Atmos compression doesn't seem to be as objectionable as some of the stereo compression options have been. I can't hear a difference in CD quality and HD or UHD so I'd probably also miss the streamed versus Blu-ray Atmos quality issue which is clearly there based on the specs of the two.

I prefer my 300 and Sub set for music over my Ultra, Sub, 100, HT Room Atmos or stereo. My 300 only Rooms sound pretty good, a bit weak on the low end, but I'm now wondering if my high speach enhancement setting on the Ultra is impacting that comparison.

I can't see the value in buying Blu-ray disks these days, if my ears were better I might.

Never been a Prince fan but I've gotten so many recommendations to try his Atmos releases I have been enjoying a lot of his stuff. Had to look, up the lyrics to When Dives Cry after listening to it many times just for the sound.

At the risk of admitting I’m not the Sonos “sound listening benchmark” that others should believe and not their own ears 😂…. below in the app under Speech Enhancement is where it is recommended that it be turned off for music.

A second take from that recommendation could suggest that the frequency bands for dialogue aren’t being increased; but that the other frequencies are being reduced/slightly muted. However, that is typically the case with any EQ in that adjustments for one frequency (+/-) impacts the others by some degree.

Edit: As far as I can tell the speech enhancement only applies to TV content, not streaming sources.

-- Ignore the rest of this post!

I'm a bit surprised to see that the speech enhancement is active when streaming music. My bad for not reading the messages.

Still I'm surprised given all the music versus TV settings we have now that this isn't also a dual mode setting.

I'm going to have to pay some attention to this in several modes, streaming through Sonos, streaming through the TVs Amazon app and when watching different things (movie versus music documentary) directly from the TV.

Ian_S:

 if instruments are panning around the room that would be a gimmick.  Atmos orchestral music does not do that old “quad” trick.

We may need to get further clarification. As I was playing the Prince Blu-Ray disc even though there was no video in the sense of a movie it did show a screen saver. When I turned off the Speech Enhancement there was a noticeable difference toward the positive. Not an overt difference but an improvement nonetheless. I would assume if one were playing their Apple Music collection via their AppleTV box through the TV the same would apply. Although I haven’t tested it using ATV as the music source. That being said it most likely applies to any music HDMI source such as a disc player or gaming box and possibly ATV. Of course when streaming to a Sonos Playbar the HDMI section is not in use; as it’s over WiFi.

I have a few musical documentaries saved from Amazon that I can test out. I'm going to be trying the Amazon Music app on the TV too.

Music app is going to be easy, the documentaries, I may end up switching it on and off depending on what is on-screen.