midwestapplefan

Here's the issue for real audiophiles:

Airplay is a badly compromised system for hifi audio. First, it is limited to 16bit 44kHz. Even Chromecast Audio goes up 24bit 96kHz. If you're happy with CD quality audio then Airplay is....OK, but audio has come a long way in the past 10 years so let me ask you are you happy with your 1080p TV or do you want 4K? Why then would you compromise on audio?

Second issue is Airplay wants to control the clocking of the musical stream. Taking control of the clocking away from the end devise is a compromise. This gets complicated so Google the term, "RAAT and clock ownership" to read some discussions about why Airplay's scheme for managing clocking is not ideal.

When you start to go over $1,000 for audio components, you're near the price range where quality should really matter. A much better way to go about this is to buy devises that are roon ready. NAD is doing this as well as ELAC, Bluesound, Creek, Naim, Krell, PS Audio, and many more. What a roon ready device does is integrate with the roon player (kicks iTunes in the butt) and allows for all audio formats including FLAC up to 32bit 384kHz, DSD up to 512, and Master Quality Authentication MQA files), It allows for the endpoint to own its own clock, allows for multi room audio. It is a far better system if you really care about music.

It seems Denon and Merantz could easily updated their devices to be roon ready if they go through the process. At that point their receivers could be considered by more serious audiophiles.

ATMOS is a marketing scheme. It is not superior to a 5.1 system. 

Since Dobly failed to gain ground with ATMOS in movie theaters (you nearly never  hear it mentioned anymore in your neighborhood cinema.  Dobly has been gunning hard for it in the home theater segment where  average consumers are not as sophisticated and don’t know better.   

 As an example, quality of a loudspeaker is much more important than quantity place throughout the room.  Universally, anyone would be better spending their budget on five speakers that were really good, then the eight or 10 speakers required for a true Atmos implementation. 

And it is beyond silly to expect you’re going to get an ATMOS experience from a sound bar.  It is just a marketing ploy to slap a brand name on something that can’t do the job.

Just like a pair of stereo speakers can place instruments in front closer to the left or to the right by how the sound is balanced between the two speakers, this is also done with a 5.1 system where the amount of sound placed in the rear or the front speakers will make the sound appear closer to the back or closer to the front,  or halfway in between.   You don’t need 10 speakers to achieve this effect.  Anyone who has heard of quadraphonic version of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side  of the Moon understands this.   With just four speakers you can have the sound swirl around the entire room as the sound gets balanced from one speaker to the next.  That was done with technology over 20 years ago.   It has nothing to do with ATMOS. 

 Why the  writer of  this story feels Atmos is so good can only make me speculate. But I can say unequivocally  that high quality speaker can reproduce the subtleties of sound, the large dynamic range, and very low and very high frequencies in a way that will get lost in an Atmos setups in most cases.  This is definitely a case of less, given a certain budget,  being more. 

I use Capture One Pro which is used by many of the top pros including Annie Leibovitz.  The software is in many ways superior to what Adobe does and is what you'd expect from a company that also manufactures some of the best medium format cameras in the world.  It works for both Mac and PC and when you buy it you can use it on up to three computers.  Capture One Pro has great asset management.  I'm just a middle of the road semi-professional and already have over 5TB of photos so those cloud solutions simply suck for so many reasons.  In the long run it is much less expensive than renting an Adobe product too.  For photo editing I'll take my photos out to Affinity Pro or Pixelmator on my Mac, or out to Corel Photo Paint on a PC.  Stop feeding the Adobe beast and get more for less.