At this point, each speaker should be working, so the next test is to try playing real content you’d listen to that has been mixed for Dolby Atmos. You’ll only know from playing real content, like movies you watch or songs you listen to, if the immersive experience you’re expecting is right or not.
You can sit for a full-length movie but, realistically, that isn’t a good test. You’ll want a brief sequence that you can watch and replay, repeatedly, while you make adjustments. It’ll give you a benchmark to refer back to with each change you make. Once you have that, you can make adjustments to your setup to improve the audio.
Sol Levante is a short anime film produced by Netflix that’s perfect for this. It’s under five minutes long, so you can replay it again and again. More importantly, it makes use of an extensive Dolby Atmos spatial audio mix that works as a stress test for your setup. The audio playback features movements and positional effects to help you test how accurately your system places sounds around and above you.
There are a couple of things you’ll want to listen out for as the movie plays. Volume is important, but for Dolby Atmos, spatial awareness is the greater priority. Audio that moves around on-screen should move throughout your speakers, with dialogue that stays anchored and clear at the front. Any ambient effects should help give you that immersive feel of a space greater than just the screen, filling the entire room around you from top to bottom.
The whole point of Dolby Atmos audio is for you to feel like you’re experiencing three-dimensional audio. If Sol Levante sounds right, you can move onto a bigger test, like a full-blown movie. Just be sure that you stick to a benchmark if you want to make further tweaks. It could be a key point in the film with a few minutes of variation in the audio, for instance, that you replay again and again to get your setup sounding right.
You can also use other types of content, like music through Apple Music, to test Dolby Atmos. For the full Dolby Atmos experience, however, you’ll need an Apple TV 4K connected via HDMI to your kit. The important thing here is picking songs with obvious spatial effects, with a good set of vocals, instruments and effects throughout. It helps if it’s music that you listen to regularly, as you’ll have a better feel for how the music should sound in your room.
