Installing Dolby Atmos in my small home studio

Over time, I will update this blog post to clarify and explain my Dolby Atmos 7.1.4 studio setup.

I've been putting off writing this post for a while. I wish I had journaled my entire experience installing Atmos from the very beginning because installing a 7.1.4 setup in a home studio is not easy. There's no guide, and you must troubleshoot while thinking outside of the box for everything to work.

There are two things I wanted to do in my studio. One is to author and create Atmos content through Nuendo. The second, harder one is to listen to consumer Atmos content through the same 7.1.4 speaker arrangement. Not listening to consumer content through the same studio setup means you can't reference what your peers are doing! The inner workings of why you can't play Atmos content easily through Windows or Mac need supplemental articles. Still, it boils down to that professional audio gear cannot decode and playback finalized Atmos files. To play consumer-released Atmos, you need an AV receiver. Those can be expensive, and integrating them into a full-blown studio atmos setup can get tricky.

I've never found anyone who solved installing Small Studio Atmos quite as I have. The colleagues I know who work with immersive audio either can't consume Atmos content in their studio or use the Dolby Binaural decoder as their primary monitoring solution. I had a meeting with Dolby in an 11.1.6 music studio, and they had no way to play consumer content. It's insane that so many Dolby Atmos engineers aren't referencing released content on the studio system on which they work.

I have two playback paths in my studio routing into my speaker setup. In the flowchart diagram, one path is red for the Nuendo pathway. One is green for the AV receiver pathway. My solution to getting both audio pathways summed together for the same speaker array is to use a patch bay set to half-normal. To ease the readability of the diagram, I left out the signal flow for my front and rear height power amplifiers. All my bed speakers are active monitors, and my heights are passive and require amplification.

The Nuendo pathway starts with an RME RayDAT. It has a total of four 8-channel ADAT I/Os, which is more than enough to feed into a 7.1.4 setup. One ADAT connection on the RayDAT connects to a Focusrite 18i20 Gen 3. Those 8 Focusrite outputs hook into the rear of my patch bay (Samson S-Patch). The Focusrite outputs connect [waterfall] to the inputs of the surrounds, rear surrounds, front height, and rear height. From the RME RayDAT, I have a SPIDF connection that goes into my front left and front right monitors, which then feeds a matching subwoofer with the crossover set to 80hz.

I picked the Denon receiver (Denon X3700H) as it has pre-outs for all speaker outputs. The pre-outs on the Denon give me a clean line-level signal that I can hook into my system and patch bay. As with the RME RayDAT SPIDF, the front left, right, and sub are hard-wired from the AVR, leaving the other eight monitors routed through the patch bay and analog pre-out connections.

Wait, you may be asking where the center channel is or why I haven't mentioned an LFE sub. Frankly, I don't love center channels. Since I'm primarily working on music, I find the use of an LFE superfluous. I would rather have the front left and right bolstered by the sub for full-range frequency playback. I'm sure a Dolby rep would hate me for authoring Atmos content without a center channel. Still, I'm perfectly pleased with my monitor's phantom center channel. I've never heard (with my musical brain and ears) a compelling case for center channel usage in Dolby Atmos mixed music.

To playback Atmos content via Windows, you need to use the Dolby Access app, which you can find on the Microsoft Store. You must use the app to send the correct Atmos data through HDMI. I also have an Nvidia Shield connected to the AVR. The Android TV device allows me to watch and listen to Netflix, Apple TV, Plex, Tidal, and my Atmos QC files exported from Nuendo.

I'm not a professional writer, and I struggle to make this sound straightforward. Working with this many speakers, inputs, and a dozen outputs isn't a straightforward affair. I will continually update this article to make it more concise and easy to explain!

Thanks for reading! Contact me on social media if you have any questions. The more Atmos content the better!!!