baconstang

Reminds me of my first CD player, a Technics.  It had 4 DACs. 2 for each channel.  One for the positive half of the waveform and one for the negative half, on each channel.
Much like an A-B output, but 2 DACs rather than just 2 transistors/valves.
It sounded OK for the time.

For movies, and if you've managed to put together a decent home system, for TV, Atmos is pretty amazing.
For AR/VR it's pretty essential.
For listening to popular music in various ways, it will probably be as successful as "Quad" was in the '70's.

FWIW...I installed dozens of Atmos system at Dolby HQ.  They sound fantastic.
They are also installed in rooms there to varying degrees of acoustic engineering.
The price of the speaker systems ran from about $5,000 to over $100,000.  
A good Atmos system sounds great, but is not a simple matter.

While I'm here..
AAC+ encoding sounds fine for most material.  Lossless doesn't help 16/44.1 very much.
For a step up, 24 bit helps decent recordings. Going from 44.1KHz to 88.2 or 96KHz can improve recordings with lots of HF transients and wide dynamics.
Both of those things are incumbent on a very nice monitoring system, and good room acoustics.  Or a pricey set of cans.

BTW...You can successfully compress 24/88 files with ALAC, to keep the file size reasonable.

Where did I read "Slow and steady wins the race"?

Don't know about the validity of those number, however, since they haven't refreshed the 27" iMac with ASi, I'm not surprised those numbers are seemingly low.

Amazon probably misread Apple for Azus, and the dog food was the closest thing.