Sound is the issue for me. Totally happy with the visuals: TV big and close enough to fill my vision. But the sound over streaming is compressed shite. Even when they say "Dolby Atmos", it's a thin Atmos layer over the compressed signal DD+, not Atmos over True HD lossless audio. I suppose, from their perspective, it makes sure I also buy the 4K disk after paying for the movie on streaming.
As you'll have noticed, Atmos isn't really an audio quality indicator (the way the Dolby Digital trademark was used). Atmos is really just a metadata stream for multidimensional audio panning so a single set of audio streams can be interpreted across many different surround setups.
Hypothetically you'll get a more accurate spatial response, but again as you noted, they tend to just do a surround background bed with a few Atmos objects for voices and explicit sources.
True. But the amount of people who care about that is tiny compared with the masses. For music for example, I'm a happy Qobuz customer because I appreciate hi-res quality and I have the gear to enjoy it, but I know plenty of folks who are just fine with Pandora or Spotify. Same with this. I'd be willing to bet a huge percentage of folks will watch these movies in their mobile.
Same here. No matter what I do my sound won't be as good as a theater, and then there is the source data issue too. That's why I want to see loud movies in theaters.
But for most movies, the sound doesn't matter that much, it's more about the story and characters and visuals.
