surround sound

A pair of Atmos elevation modules pressed into service as rear surrounds is a very common compromise after a move, and the room numbers in this one make the choice clearer than usual. The owner can no longer wall-mount their Magnat ATM 202s, so right now they run as the rear pair in 7.1. The...

Someone put into words a thing I have been arguing with my brother-in-law about for two seasons: for football, the Atmos mix does more for the experience than 4K and HDR put together. Sharper grass does not stop you watching a game through a window. Crowd noise arriving from above and behind you...

Don't Breathe reached cinemas on 26 August 2016 and never got a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray. On streaming it is usually 1080p with a 5.1 track, no Atmos. What Hi-Fi went back to it this week because it has sat in their test rotation for years, and the conclusion is one that gets lost in every soundbar...

I keep a couple of 5.1 only titles in the demo pile precisely because they wreck the assumption that more channels equals better sound, and the best of them just turned ten. Don't Breathe hit cinemas on 26 August 2016, which is the awkward part of its life story. 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray had only...

I still have a couple of the old show discs in a drawer, the ones you would come home with after a dealer visit and immediately annoy the household with. NextLevel Acoustics is trying to bring that back at CEDIA with Beyond the Room, except it is a download rather than a disc. Ninety seconds...

Good question raised on Home Theater Forum: how do you actually know whether a 2.0 track on a disc is straight stereo or Dolby Surround encoded, with surround information matrixed into those two channels waiting to be pulled back out. Disc covers list channel counts, not encoding, and the online...

TechRadar ran the Ultimea Poseidon D60 through a few days of testing and the verdict is roughly what you would guess for a 5.1 system under 200 dollars: the surrounds do real work, dialogue comes through clean, and then the bass turns out to have no bite and there are no upfiring drivers at all...

Picked up the standalone 50th anniversary Blu-ray mostly for the concert, and I think that is the honest way to approach this disc. The Los Angeles Sports Arena show from April 26, 1975 runs 16 songs, restored and remastered by Steven Wilson at 96kHz/24-bit, and it opens with Raving and Drooling...

Someone asked this on the home theater sub and I thought it was a fair question rather than a naive one. Scroll through setup threads and you see Klipsch, SVS, Polk, JBL, Monitor Audio, KEF if the budget stretches. B&W barely comes up, despite being one of the best known speaker names on the...

The Rubber Soul Special Edition lands October 2. New stereo mix from Giles Martin and Sam Okell taken off the original four-track tapes, plus Dolby Atmos, high-resolution stereo, the 1965 mono and the U.S. Capitol configuration - though which of those you actually get depends on which edition...

What Hi-Fi has finally got the Q Acoustics 3050c 5.1 package into its test room and the verdict lands where these packages nearly always land. Agile, energetic, impressive bass, and then a centre channel described as middling, with a noted lack of consistency across the front three. That last...

What Hi-Fi went round the industry again this year and asked engineers at the manufacturers which scenes they actually reach for when benchmarking kit. Worth reading, but read it with one eye open. Harman's consumer audio side put forward the Impossible Race from Ready Player One, Shallow from...