Surround and Atmos

[arthie]

Hi everyone, I wounder if anyone is doing some surround and Atmos stuff in Mixbus (and how) or if you just stay with stereo. Actually it might become a thing soon due to apples Atmos promotion. Customers could soon ask for it. How do you handle with this? Would like any thought of you guys. Also mixing and mastering will get much closer together when I don't understand this imersiv thing wrong. 
Has anybody set up his studio for it yet and got a setup running using mixbus or do you just mix to stems and author (and do panorama things) in another software? Will immersive audio part by part displace stereo or is it just too much costs for too less of an improvement?
Best
Arne

[krans]

Hi everyone, I wounder if anyone is doing some surround and Atmos stuff in Mixbus (and how) or if you just stay with stereo. Actually it might become a thing soon due to apples Atmos promotion. Customers could soon ask for it. How do you handle with this? Would like any thought of you guys. Also mixing and mastering will get much closer together when I don't understand this imersiv thing wrong. 
Has anybody set up his studio for it yet and got a setup running using mixbus or do you just mix to stems and author (and do panorama things) in another software? Will immersive audio part by part displace stereo or is it just too much costs for too less of an improvement?
Best
Arne

I've never tried Atmos, but I spend quite some time with ambisonics.
And even though I'd really like to use Mixbus 32C (my main daw) for this, I found it's just too much of a hassle to set up.
So I make music and sound in MB32C, and place it around the room with ambisonics plugins in Reaper.

The MB32C manual actually states:
"[...] if you are using Mixbus to create sound effects for theatre, mix buses 9-12 might be used as sources for 8 surround speakers around the theatre. You would have the ability to change the position or proportion of mix buses 1-8 in the surround speakers at will."

Yet I haven't found a straightforward or useful way of doing this.
If someone uses MB for surround/ambisonics/Atmos, it'd be interesting to hear how they/you set it up!

[arthie]

The big thing in Atmos is that it is an immersive format like MPEGH, so it does not very much care about your speaker setup, you just place objects and beds in the room and the codec translates this to your actuall speaker setting. I haven't found any hint on how to do it in Mixbus (as you probably need one Master-Bus fitting your speaker setup which should be 7.1.4 at least to really hear what you are working on. Perhaps you could work binaural at the moment. But longtime a surround-Master would be needed, when working atmos. Or your just have to export each object/stem as a single file and do the authoring and placing stuff in another software, but then why should you use mixbus, when actually the codec does the summing and the workflow is not very straight forward for this special work.

[Frank]

I am planning a setup
Started with the hardware: one needs amps: saw that good amps arte available rather cheaply in the form of surround receivers. The ones without HDMI are heavy and cheap

I opted for the Denon 3805 : it has 7 good amps . I have now 4 of them. about 70 to 100 euro each.

Speakers: I am a big fan of Tannoy Dual concentrics. If you want localization, these are the only speakers  who do that.
Now they are big and because of demand expensive.

But Tannoy used to have a stylish surround range, The Tannoy Arena. They are good, several types of mounting, originally they were about 500 each, but they are not in demand much.

Occasionally one can get a pair for a 100, or even a 5.1 set for 200. They look stylish, i have a Atmos 9xx. set in my living and about 24 waiting to be installed.. I get many comments about how cute they are. Low female impedance.

D/A conversion i do with Motu AVB interfaces. No long cable runs, all twisted pair.  Control ia webbased, access via any computer.

DA converters get the signals from a plugin host: Gig performer Or Carla. I do not think any daw is fit for that.  Mostly just mono recording maybe stereo.

Dear VR and soundtrajectory are impatiently waiting ..

Kind Reagards

Frank

MPC5 is a good alternative..

[arthie]

Thank you for your thoughts and information, there are quite some good hints.

[Scardanelli]

Ideally Mixbus will soon create the ability to have a surround channel strip, with a panner able to pan the signal around any of the designated outputs. Cubase & Pro Tools have had it for years.

Simply using the mix busses for separate channels is very limited. To fly a bee around the room from a mono recording needs a 5.1 channel strip !

[arthie]

ideally you will have the option to have 9.1.4 subgroups/masters and a panner for this format, but that is quite a way to go from where we are at right now. I would not complain if this just gets a thing in 32C and not standard mixbus as many other DAWs only have that feature in its big version, too.

[RayMasse]

Ideally Mixbus will soon create the ability to have a surround channel strip, with a panner able to pan the signal around any of the designated outputs. Cubase & Pro Tools have had it for years.

Simply using the mix busses for separate channels is very limited. To fly a bee around the room from a mono recording needs a 5.1 channel strip !

+1

[Frank]

Ideally Mixbus will soon create the ability to have a surround channel strip, with a panner able to pan the signal around any of the designated outputs. Cubase & Pro Tools have had it for years.

Simply using the mix busses for separate channels is very limited. To fly a bee around the room from a mono recording needs a 5.1 channel strip !

But there is one small problem. One cannot make a 5.1 recording like that.  

Just like we cannot make a stereo recording from a mono source..

And at Harrison they know that very well.  After all they are the designers of the finest Atmos recording console.

MPC5 Atmos   
Please note : this video can be addictive ..

and the basics for a panner solution are there in Ardour.  I remember MMM complaining about it few years back..

I have hope that one day recordings will be  

Stereo


Kind regards


Frank

[madmaxmiller]

Yep

   

This is what you get when you choose 6 channels (for 5.1) in Ardour. You get 6 speakers evenly distributed over 360 degrees and you can move the dot along the periphery of the circle, but not into the middle. Thus, you can place sound at the periphery but not in the room. Not to mention that this is not 5.1 at all.

Ideally there could be a post fader plugin which takes a signal, pans it and sends it to four or six mixbuses for the front/surround speakers and has a lowpass /dedicated LFE channel which sends to yet another mixbus for the sub. Should be doable with pin management, sounds actually quite simple when I think about it. Atmos is, of course, at another level and I wouldn't expect Harrison to implement this into their low cost DAWs.

MMM