When listening to music, they prefer to use a pair of high-end HiFi speakers and a high-end stereo (dual mono) amplifier.
Here's the thing, Atmos MUSIC had/has incredible
potential... who was that composer that had the idea of surrounding the audience with four different orchestras from all sides? Stravinsky, Bruckner? I forget.
But who on earth that is making good music currently -- not per se, those making TV and film soundtracks and have worked with surround setups already for years -- is actually willing to take the time and effort to retool their entire production style and way of
thinking about writing and recording traditional stereo music to make music that is vastly more complicated only for a
tiny fraction of listeners?
It's worth pointing out, when surround mixing first became popular, we didn't have studios/labels/artists champing at the bit to produce music for 7.1, even. So the notion that this was somehow supposed to happen with Atmos was quite silly.
Dolby paid Deadmau5 to try to generate Atmos hype, even saying he would work primarily in Atmos in the future at the end of their promo video... I was highly dubious at those words.
Brian Eno did some work with it, but he had some weird algorithm-selected loops that people could trigger themselves, like a pseudo-interactive type thing... sounds cool on a tech level, but is nothing like what I'm talking about.
For one thing you essentially have to double/triple the amount of parts written and recorded to provide enough movement for all the beds. That's an enormous engineering and production overhead, in a time where studio budgets have radically
decreased instead of going up.
Dolby and Apple both made a mistake with Atmos: They failed to bring the actual producers on board with it, and there's virtually no team capable of both writing/composing
and producing in Atmos effectively, it's just too expensive and the few who are capable of doing it have no motivation to do so.
In order for Atmos to take off, we need a revolutionary who is both willing and has the capacity to show people how magical of an experience being surrounded by musical voices can be. There was never going to be a demand for this, because the thing Dolby wants people to want does not exist, just as no one knew they wanted The Beatles until they existed. They're turning over rocks to look for golden eggs when they should have first invested in the golden-goose conservation program.
In other words, there was never going to be an Atmos demand until an artist/producer combo created Atmos demand.
In the end, much like that composer (apparently it was Stockhausen, I looked it up), Dolby/Apple's 'Spatial music' idea looks incredible on paper, but the technical expense required to engineer such music simply doesn't math out.
