Why Can't You Make Dolby Atmos Without Upmixing?
· 20 min read
The audio industry has developed a peculiar contradiction: Dolby Atmos is celebrated as the future of immersive audio, while upmixing — the very process that makes Atmos rendering possible — is dismissed as illegitimate. This article asks a simple question: can you actually make Dolby Atmos without upmixing?
The answer, examined through five decades of Dolby's own technology and the published physics of spatial audio rendering, is no.