Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion HiFi & HT Chat ‘Budget’ AV System

I must emphasise, as always, that sound is totally subjective. Having said that, I would go for the hybrid Atmos. For me, it provides sound (I am talking music here) that is just more lifelike. When I go to a live performance (and I often do - in London I am literally just round the corner from the Wigmore Hall) I am always struck, whatever the ensemble I am listening to, as to how much more free and airy it is than even the very best electronic system. Each instrument or voice (provided they are not amplified) makes its sound and those sound waves are immediately free to escape, so to speak, and go wherever they wish, independent of each other. Hence the airiness and ambient enhanced sound.

With reproduced sound, first it has to be captured by microphones which (however good) constrain the sound into a figurative 'pipe' (even multi-miking does this) before the waves have escaped very far. Then someone with a mixing desk fiddles with all sorts of parameters and eventually those sounds (in the vast majority of cases) are combined as just 2 (stereo) channels. Then we reproduce them through loudspeakers as faithfully as we can. Only then can the sound waves escape again (typically into a very small space - just a domestic room). Small wonder it is so unlifelike. I find that the extra speakers and speaker spacing of an Atmos layout, together with the jiggery pokery of things like Auro 3D or Neural X, add artificial but still effective degrees of sound freedom that the constraints of stereo alone do not do.

Many years ago (back in the 1950s) Gilbert Briggs, the founder of Wharfedale speakers, ran a series of concerts at the Royal Festival Hall where, behind curtains, he had musicians playing and also a stereo system cutting in and out with the same music. I was very young, but it was pretty hard to distinguish the two. However, the distance from the listener to the musicians or speakers was huge and so the reproduced sound could escape nearly as well as the live sounds. Atmos (or equivalents) are a piece of technical magic that, in my view, helps create an illusion of the size of venue that live performances are normally heard in. It is not for the HiFi purist, but I just like it because it takes me (I should say it takes my brain's interpretation of the sounds) nearer to the Holy Grail of being in a live venue. Bearing in mind the subjectivity of sound, it may not do what you want, of course.