Somebody on Reddit put Sonic 3 up as their new family friendly Atmos reference disc, sitting just behind The Wild Robot, and their existing rotation is Top Gun Maverick, Saving Private Ryan and Avatar Fire and Ash. Their description of it is the useful part: no real LFE punch, but roughly every five minutes there is a discrete object flying around your head, and on a 7.1.4 layout that is exactly what you want to be showing off.
That distinction gets lost constantly. The discs everybody reaches for to impress a visitor are bass demos, not object demos. Top Gun Maverick is a chest compression test. Saving Private Ryan is a dynamics test. Neither of them proves your height layer is even wired correctly, and I have been in more than one room where the ceiling speakers were out of phase or plain silent and the owner had no idea because everything they played shook the couch enough to cover it.
A disc with constant discrete panning and no bass to hide behind is a better diagnostic than anything with a subwoofer showcase on the box. If a ball flies from front left to rear right and it stutters or drops through the middle of the room, you have found a problem. The Wild Robot works the same way, so does most modern animation, because animated mixes are built object first and are not constrained by what a boom mic caught on set.
What is everybody using to check the height layer specifically? Not to show off, to actually catch a miswired ceiling speaker.
That distinction gets lost constantly. The discs everybody reaches for to impress a visitor are bass demos, not object demos. Top Gun Maverick is a chest compression test. Saving Private Ryan is a dynamics test. Neither of them proves your height layer is even wired correctly, and I have been in more than one room where the ceiling speakers were out of phase or plain silent and the owner had no idea because everything they played shook the couch enough to cover it.
A disc with constant discrete panning and no bass to hide behind is a better diagnostic than anything with a subwoofer showcase on the box. If a ball flies from front left to rear right and it stutters or drops through the middle of the room, you have found a problem. The Wild Robot works the same way, so does most modern animation, because animated mixes are built object first and are not constrained by what a boom mic caught on set.
What is everybody using to check the height layer specifically? Not to show off, to actually catch a miswired ceiling speaker.
