CAV discs were the best!!
We actually borrowed a machine and discs of “Lawrence of Arabia” and had to change discs every 1/2 hour!
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that you were one of the people I was referring to.
We'll see. I know enough to be dangerous...but not enough to be right!
I really think you hit the nail on the head on this one. consider how Sonos' soundbars allow you to connect their Play:1 speakers as surrounds. it's not that far of a leap to incorporate reflective effects and use the built-in mics to expand and refine the soundfield, and a future generation of speakers could incorporate upward firing drivers.Yes, but more.
Everyone with a smartphone is benefiting from computational photography and getting vacation and birthday snapshots far better than they could a few years before. Good sensors plus lots of computer algorithms are doing things on photographs that were a few years ago the domain of skilled photographers and photo editors. But now, HDR is free. Co-adding raw frames to beat down dark current and read noise is done in hardware. Video is recorded at 30 fps, but 60 fps data is to reduce motion blur or do super-resolution computations.
Noise canceling headphones are the canonical example of computation audio in the consumer world. We're now starting see this taken further and can guess at how it might apply to home theater.
Long story short, there might be extensions to Atmos and DTS:X for the high end. I think they can benefit all the more from smart speakers. But I think the real benefits will come soonest to the lower end. And I think pretty soon the sub-$3000 5.1 surround system will be destroyed by an ensemble of $500 to $1000 smart speakers. Similarly to how camera phones are destroying the point and shoot camera market.
To borrow from the Apple HomePod page:
Take a high-end Atmos system: Currently the Audyssey-type calibration systems that consumer audio uses, as far as I know, adjust speaker delay and response function. But they don't measure 3D speaker positions, or have any ability to perform beam forming or multi-speaker noise cancelation. They don't truly calibrate a three-dimensional speaker array for generalized 3D sound. It's just a means to make the speakers have a "flat" response and sound as if from the same distance from a given listening position. And this is all done with relatively puny DSP chips in $1000-class AVRs.
So let's add more speakers -- for the high end enthusiast -- and we'll have microphones in the speakers. And the calibration system with have the computational power of next year's iPhone, with its machine learning ("NeuralEngine") cores. It will self-calibrate. Every speaker can chirp and the whole around will listen. The system would build a 3D model of its speaker locations and also a room model with its obstructions and echoes. With its large array of speakers, it will use beam forming to not just have a EQ curve and time delay, but actively modify sound from all speakers to combat background noise (because even enthusiasts struggle with HVAC, street noise, people walking overhead, etc) and improve localization of three imagery.
Because this is a high-end system, maybe it includes an additional calibration microphone, as Audssey does currently. But instead of just measuring a two foot bubble around the sweet spot, the user will do a multiple reading spread over the entire room. And the system will detect during listening whether you're alone, or in a full room, or if it's just you back you're in the back row and not the front row, and adjust its output accordingly.
But what about the regular person. This is starting to happen with a pair of HomePods for stereo sound. I imagine an ensemble of five "HomePods". Again, they will self-calibrate against the room and each other. No external Audyssey mic or three hours needed for the homeowner to "calibrate". They'll just do it. And if the furniture changes or the flooring goes from carpet to hardwood, it will self-adjust without being told. And the speakers, being ensembles of speakers, will not need to be in the proscribed 5.1 arrangement.
Even simpler then is a soundbar. Take a quality soundbar. Add in microphones and computer brain. Let it self-sense the room's characteristics, and apply machine learning "magic" to the audio processing, and out comes far better faked-Atmos than any bar can accomplish today.
