Dolby Atmos was introduced to much fanfare for home theaters in 2014. The new format was trumpeted as one of the biggest advances in multi-channel audio in years. Indeed, it brought a more immersive 3D sound to home theater. Consumer electronics partners jumped on the bandwagon early, and products like speakers, receivers, and UHD Blu-ray players started appearing in the market over the next two years.

While new technology is great, you need things that take advantage of it. For Dolby Atmos, the content was slow in coming. The first movie for home viewing released in Atmos on Blu-ray was Transformers, Age of Extinction. Video games like Star Wars: Battlefront followed as Dolby worked with content makers to make full use of the new format. While these titles were excellent showcases for the format, others were slow in coming.

Fast forward to 2019, and all that has changed dramatically. For one, there are over 4400 theaters in the U.S. with immersive Dolby Atmos sound, exposing millions of theatergoers to new levels in cinema audio. Almost every new AV receiver and surround processor now sports support for the format, with most supporting its competitor DTS:X as well. Apple recently announced Dolby Atmos support for the 4K Apple TV and is upgrading its iTunes movie rental offerings to Atmos as well. Amazon's latest streaming stick also supports the sound format. Speakers from respected brands like Bowers and Wilkins and Klipsch are available, both in surface mount or architectural styles designed expressly for delivering those three-dimensional height and positional overhead effects.

You may be thinking: What can I watch with a Dolby Atmos surround sound system in my Roswell or Metro Atlanta home’s media room? The answer is plenty - read on to learn more.

A home theater can be a significant investment. Like a bathroom or kitchen remodel, it can also be a big job. There's a lot that can go into a home theater. There's the screen, the projector, the speakers, the audio receiver, processor or amplifier, control capability, lighting, seating, décor, and more to think about.

Of course, your home theater area might be a setup designed around a living or family room, or it can be a full-boat dedicated home theater in an extra or purpose-built room in your house. Either way, the details must be sweated to make it into a theater experience that feels special. Those details involve the right size and scale for sound and picture, the acoustics, the methods of control, and perhaps how the home theater ties into other smart home features.

It might seem daunting, right? Georgia Home Theater is here to help. As our name implies, home theaters are a core competence at our company. To make it easier for customers to see and hear what a home theater setup can be like at your home, we have built one in our flagship theater demo area in our Marietta showroom.

Did you miss the Oscar-winning Bohemian Rhapsody at the theaters? We have set the film up as a demo in our showroom, as the musical soundtrack can really show off a high-end sound system. And the visuals are equally stunning. The demo theater features some of our best brands – Anthem, Bowers and Wilkins, Sony, and more. At our Marietta showroom, you’ll get a much better sense of what to expect from a professional home theater installation in your Alpharetta-area home.

Keep reading for a brief look at what you’ll experience in the showroom – and what you could have in your own theater.

Unused rooms in your home offer a world of potential. Recent retirees may have an office they no longer need, or empty nesters may want new ways to transform their kids’ rooms. Fitness rooms, library rooms, and libraries are some of the more popular choices. Recently, we’ve also seen a lot of clients reach out to see if these spare rooms in their Vinings-area homes are big enough for a successful media room design.

Entertainment spaces used to require a lot of equipment that could easily overwhelm a small room. Over the past few years, however, technology advances have made it so you can create the ideal viewing and listening environment almost anywhere. From motorized shades that reduce glare to speakers that stay hidden from view, we outline some of our favorite features below.

If you’re making an investment in a home theater or media room, whether it’s a replica of the Strand or a more modest multi-purpose room, you want great sound to go along with a great picture on a big screen. While it’s a fact that better quality speakers and components will deliver better audio quality, sometimes other factors affect the sound adversely no matter how good the equipment is.

The inherent acoustics of your Atlanta media room or home theater layout might have more effect on the sound than you think. For example, too many hard surfaces might make some sound frequencies overly harsh. Things like windows along one wall and other room features can affect the sound, creating the impression that you might not be able to achieve the enveloping sound you want that rivals the local multiplex.

Don’t worry though; there are solutions. Home theater is in our name, so we know a thing or two about home theater sound. Read on to learn more.

This blog has now been updated; you can view this updated post here.

Multi-channel soundtracks for film have come a long, long way in the past 25 years.

In the 1980s, Dolby Laboratories developed the Dolby Surround sound format, and it began by taking stereo soundtracks and “matrixing” sound for dialog and effects to the center channel and surround speakers by some clever processing. It was followed by Dolby Pro Logic, which took that technology a step further, allowing the stereo left and right channels to have additional audio information that with the proper equipment could direct those specific sounds to center and rear speakers. 

Dolby Pro Logic was good for its time, and because most movies were still on VHS videotape, tape could only handle a certain amount of audio bandwidth.  Dolby Digital 5.1, also called AC-3, was the first digital surround format and birthed the modern era of digital audio in video soundtracks.  First used on Laserdiscs, a predecessor to the DVD that never quite went mainstream, Dolby Digital became the standard for DVD and also for high definition broadcast TV. 

Today, the original Dolby Digital has been thoroughly reworked and enhanced over time.  Each successive version – like Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD – has brought increases in audio quality and the precision of placing sounds in a sound field for more realistic and immersive entertainment.   The culmination of this development is Dolby Atmos. 

So at this point, you may have heard of Dolby Atmos (or not) and wonder what all the fuss is about.  You may be wondering why you’d want it for your home cinema in the Alpharetta area and what changes it might mean to your home theater layout. 

We thought the best way to do this would be to do a little FAQ (frequently asked questions).  Read on as we cover the basics of Dolby Atmos and to see if it’s right for your home theater.