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[EB1000]

Hi

As you know, Tidal offers Dolby Atmos music. The latest version of Tidal-Media-Downloader now supports downloading of Dolby Atmos encoded music as lossless FLAC files. I gave it a try and the downloaded FLAC was indeed bigger in size, 24bit/48kHz with larger bitrate than the average CD quality FLAC. It is not an MQA file, and it plays normally in stereo using any player. Here is a sample of an Atmos encoded FLAC:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ueal4v5fq3u276a/05 - Illenium - First Time.flac?dl=0

I wonder how did they manage to add the additional channels on object metadata to the FLAC format while leaving it backward compatible with non Atmos enabled players?

Is there a way to decode such FLAC file and sent the Dolby True HD Atmos bitstream to an AVR using MC27?

Is there a FLAC analyzing tool for Windows that can try to analyze such file, or convert it to MKV?

Thanks

[tij]

Google Dolby MAT ... theoretically if you bitstream this to AVR ... it will output Atmos

Unfortunayely MC atm does not bitstream audio only (with exception of DSD). Unless you add some video to it.

PS. though i wonder the merit of this for music ... drums fly over you? ... strange

Unless its for concert, where maybe there are planes flying over lol

[dtc]

Here is a demo of the immersive sound using just stereo speakers.  It does make the music more immersive.

https://www.dolby.com/atmos-visualizer-music/


To me, the interesting part is how much they do for just stereo systems. Most people do not have a multi-channel music system and atmos home theater systems are usually not optimized for music.  They already do support binaural headphone output, but they do nothing for stereo speaker setups.  The focus is clearly on multi-speaker atmos setups and headphones.

[dtc]

This information comes from Dolby sources online and may not be totally up to date. Atmos Music is relatively new and therefore keeps changing.

Dolby software delivers two output formats - one for Atmos devices like AVRs and one for headphones.

The device format uses either Dolby Digital Plus or Dolby Digital TrueHD codec.  Amazon is targeting the device market and uses that format. MAT is a decoder that some devices use to produce PCM. Tidal is focusing on the streaming/headphone market so is using the headphone format.  It uses an AC4-IMS format and contains binaural information that the DD+ and TrueHD formats do not have.

By targetting the phones/headphones Tidal can cut out the video portions and convert the stream to flac for download and that can simply be played as stereo for the headphones.  The headphone format has binaural metadata built in.  That can be decoded by Dolby software or by the headphones themselves, if so equipped.

There is a lot more on Dolby Atmos Music here

https://professional.dolby.com/music/create-music-in-dolby-atmos/