I Let Non-Audiophile People Listen to My System and Here’s What Happened
My friend Rene came over last month. Rene listens to music on his phone through a Bluetooth speaker in his kitchen and living room, like many younger people do now days, and considers this a solved problem. He is not interested in hi-res audio. He has never asked what format anything is in. He is a normal person.
I put on Dark Side of the Moon 50th in Atmos. He is a Pink Floyd fan.
What happened next is the reason I’m writing this post.
The Setup
For context, this is the system described in the setup post: B&W 705 S2 fronts, matching surrounds and center, four in-ceiling Atmos height speakers, dual Rythmik LV12 subs, Denon AVR-3700H, Emotiva amp on the fronts, Shield Pro running Kodi, audio files on a NAS extracted with Lossless Extract. The Dark Side of the Moon files are the 2023 50th anniversary Atmos Blu-ray TrueHD Atmos stream with full object metadata, playing back through the Denon which decodes and places the audio objects across the room.
I did not explain any of this to Rene besides “this is in surround.” I just pressed play.
What Rene Said
The heartbeat at the start of the album which in the Atmos mix comes from behind you and slightly below, as described in the formats post made him turn around in his seat. Not metaphorically. He physically turned around to look behind him. Then he looked at the ceiling. Then he looked at me.
“Is that coming from up there?”
Yes. That’s the ceiling speakers.
“Why do you have speakers in the ceiling?”
I explained Atmos. He nodded in the way people nod when they’re waiting for you to stop talking so music can happen again. We kept listening.
By the time Money started the cash register, which in the Atmos mix arcs smoothly around the room continuously rather than bouncing between fixed speaker positions, he had stopped looking at his phone, which for Rene is a significant event. “That’s insane,” he said, about the cash register. “How is it doing that?”
I started to explain object-based audio. He waved his hand.
“No I mean how is it moving like that. It’s going around the whole room.”
Yes. That’s what it does.
We listened to the rest of the album. He didn’t say much during The Great Gig in the Sky which is the correct response to The Great Gig in the Sky in Atmos. At the end he sat for a second and then said “I’ve heard that album probably two hundred times and I’ve never heard it sound like that.”
I did not say “that’s because you’ve been listening to it wrong.” I thought it. I didn’t say it.
What My Wife Said
My wife is a more complicated case because she lives with the system and has therefore developed opinions about it through proximity and disdain for the volume I often listen at rather than enthusiasm. She knows what Atmos is in the sense that she knows it’s why there are speakers in the ceiling, which she accepted with more grace than I expected. She definitely appreciates the movie surround aspect more.
Her honest assessment, delivered approximately six months into owning the system: “It sounds like being at a concert but without the people.” This is, I think, one of the better descriptions of what a well set up multichannel system actually does that I’ve heard from anyone, audiophile or otherwise. This is especially the case with the Running on Empty intro from the Jackson Browne DVD-A. She was not trying to be complimentary about the hobby. She was describing her experience. I’ll take it.
Her specific favorite is Wish You Were Here, which surprised me. Not the album I’d have predicted, because I also have Tears for Fears Songs from the Big Chair in Atmos and she loves 80s new wave. After hearing WYWH playing from the kitchen one evening and came and sat down without being asked, which has happened maybe three times in the life of the system. “What is this?” It was the title track in Atmos, the acoustic guitar introduction, which in the 2025 50th anniversary mix has a presence and intimacy in the room that the stereo version doesn’t achieve in the same way. She knew the song. She hadn’t heard it like that.
What My Brother Said
My brother owns a decent stereo setup, a two-channel system he’s been building for years, turntable, amp, decent bookshelf speakers. He knows what he’s doing. He is also mildly skeptical of multichannel audio in the way that serious two-channel listeners often are, which is that he considers it a concession to spectacle rather than fidelity.
I played him the Jeff Buckley Grace Atmos mix. Specifically Lover, You Should’ve Come Over, which has string arrangements that the Atmos mix places with specificity that the stereo can’t quite manage. He listened to the whole song without comment. Then he said “play it again.”
He did not immediately convert to multichannel. He went home and went back to his turntable. But when I asked him later what he thought he said “I kept waiting for it to feel like a gimmick and it didn’t.” Which from a two-channel purist I’ll take as a win.
He also asked what speakers I was running on the fronts. When I told him B&W 705 S2s he said “that’s good, most people run terrible fronts with these setups and then wonder why it doesn’t sound like music.” He’s not wrong. The front soundstage is where the music lives and if those speakers aren’t good the Atmos height channels are building something on a weak foundation.
What Nobody Said
Nobody asked what format the files were in. Nobody asked about sample rate or bit depth. Nobody asked about the NAS or the Shield or the HDMI passthrough configuration. Nobody cared that the audio engine was decoding object metadata in real time and routing it to twelve speakers based on position data embedded in the TrueHD stream.They just heard music in a room in a way that sounded different from how they’d heard music before, and they wanted to keep listening.
This is what I sometimes forget because a lot of the conversation around hi-res audio including on this blog, including in the QQ forums, including in the spec sheets and the format debates is about the gear. The gear matters when you’re setting it up. Once it’s working, it disappears. What you’re left with is just the music, and either it sounds better than it did before or it doesn’t.
In every case I’ve described above, it did. A person who listens to music on a Bluetooth kitchen speaker turned around because he heard something coming from behind him that shouldn’t have been there. That’s the whole argument for me in this hobby in one moment. I don’t need a better one than that. It’s also why when possible given the source I prefer to listen in surround.
What Rene Did Next
He texted me two weeks later. He’d bought a used Denon receiver and a set of 5.1 speakers on Craigslist. He did not ask me for advice before doing this. He sent a picture of the setup, which looked exactly like what you’d expect from someone who bought a used receiver and a 5.1 speaker set on Facebook Marketplace without asking anyone for advice first.
He said it sounded great. I believe him. The bar he was coming from was a Bluetooth kitchen speaker.
I sent him the link to the Kodi setup guide and the Lossless Extract download page. He has not followed up on either of these yet. I’m choosing to believe he’s still figuring out how to plug everything in.
The albums played during these sessions: Dark Side of the Moon 50th Atmos Blu-ray, Wish You Were Here 50th Atmos Blu-ray and Jeff Buckley Grace Atmos. All extracted with Lossless Extract. The albums post has more starting points if you’re looking for what to play first.