Dolby Atmos On Netflix Is not As Easy As You Think It Is

It has been brought to my attention that some people think that the audio you get from the Netflix Premium Tier, which is supposed to be Dolby Atmos, is actually just virtualized. That could be an astronomical problem, because if you pay for Netflix’s premium tier, they advertise that “you can watch Netflix in Dolby Atmos audio on select TV shows and movies,” and you wouldn’t get what you pay for.

However, if you have a soundbar, you may know that there can be virtualized versions of sound outputs, and if you listen or read the wrong information, you may also think that you are not getting what you pay for. I’ll lay it all out below and include some cases where you expect Dolby Atmos but don’t actually get it. Let’s get into it!

Yes, you get true Dolby Atmos

There are a few things you should know though

I have been a film and television editor for the past 31 years, and counting. My father is a retired film and television editor. I’m very familiar with broadcast and streaming standards, as well as image and sound formats, so I think I know where some of the confusion comes from. I’m going to oversimplify this because the hell I had to go through when new formats/standards/codecs came out seemingly every month because I oversaw post production for a colleague isn’t necessary for you to go through either.

When an audio engineer prepares their deliveries, there are guidelines they must meet for Netflix. The audio is a “gift” to Netflix, and they will deliver it in a box or “container”. Until you open that container, you might not see what’s inside, but some people like to guess. In the case of Dolby Atmos mixes delivered to Netflix, they are in a container that looks like this Dolby Digital Plus or DD+. Dolby Digital / Digital Plus uses a lossy 5.1 mix, while Atmos includes 3D objects that can be placed in the room to give you a more immersive experience. We go into detail about it here. Basically, using the older Dolby Digital Plus container that we first saw in 2004, in the mid-2010s a new trick was developed, called Joint Object Coding, which allows them to deliver a full Atmos scene on top of your standard 5.1 mix. Essentially, they figured out how to throw a few extra gifts in the box.

There may also be some additional confusion because Netflix has a Spatial Audio function that takes an Atmos mix and downmixes it to a 2.0 stereo mix. Again, this is simplified. They do this for headphones that support it spatial audio and spatial audio with head tracking, as well as hardware that lacks the physical height channels of an Atmos system, like a basic 2.1 soundbar or your terrible TV speakers.

Do you hear the difference?

It’s all in the bitrate

A menu to adjust the streaming settings in Asobi.

Something that could possibly be bad for the water is how much water the dam lets through. Remember I said Dolby Digital Plus is lossy? If you’re listening to a movie streamed through Netflix or pretty much any other streamer, it will stream DD+ audio at around 750kbps or less, while lossless formats like Dolby TrueHD on a 4K Blu-ray disc have a much larger 3 to 6Mbps bitrate. So, DD+ is the dam that allows a small amount of water through, while the flood garden is completely open with no loss.

Streamers do this because lossless formats are so large that they don’t guarantee a satisfying listening experience because too many variables exist between their “broadcast station” and your living room. The internet speed of your ISP, your router, the number of devices in your home vying for bandwidth, and many other factors outside of their control would make lossless streaming a hair-raising experience for them. So they stream at a much lower, more manageable bitrate to ensure a more consistent customer experience.

The power is in your hands

Not virtual, but physical

Person holding Roku remote in front of TV.

If you’re streaming from Netflix, there are a few other times when you might be fooled into thinking you’re not getting the Atmos experience you’re paying that premium for. First, you may have configured your sound system incorrectly. If your soundbar is not receiving the correct pass-through signal from your TV or streaming device, you may not be getting an Atmos mix. We wrote about this at length here on Pocket-lint.

Assuming you’re using the correct pass-through mode on your TV or streaming device, in your soundbar, the next point of failure could be Netflix itself! Reading their help pages, Netflix makes it clear that not all movies, TV shows or every season of a TV show support Atmos. Reading through Reddit’s Home Theater sub, there are people talking about watching the first season of a show with an Atmos audio track, then out of the blue, a new season didn’t support Atmos. So they expected to hear what they were already used to from a previous season, only to break those expectations with a new season. Caution emptor!