I bought a Dolby Atmos soundbar last year, ran the setup wizard, watched the little animation showing sound moving around my living room, and figured I was done. For months, I sat through movies that sounded fine but never quite lived up to the “object-based audio” pitch. No overhead rain, no helicopters actually passing overhead, nothing that split the difference between “loud” and “immersive.” I assumed my room was just too small, or that Atmos on the often troublesome streaming services was overhyped.
Then a friend asked what my TV’s audio output was set to, and I didn’t have an answer. I dug into the sound settings and found it: buried two menus deep, my TV had been set to output stereo PCM audio over HDMI the entire time. Every Atmos track from every app was getting flattened into two channels before it even left the TV. My soundbar had never once received an actual object-based audio stream.
I switched it to bitstream pass-through, put on a movie I'd already seen twice, and just about missed the difference while checking my phone. Then something crashed behind me. Actually, behind me, not just loud — I turned around before I caught myself. That's when it clicked that this soundbar had been sitting there for months doing basically nothing.