CES 2014

Dolby Atmos, a new object-oriented surround standard, was perhaps the biggest audio story at CEDIA, with speaker and receiver makers both unveiling Atmos enabled products. At GoldenEar Technology that was the HTR 7000 ceiling speaker ($500/each), which angles sound at the downward angle recommended by Dolby. There were four of them running along with GoldenEar's world-beating Triton One tower in front, SuperCenter XL, and smaller Triton Two in the rear, powered by a combination of Pass and NAD amps fed by an Integra pre-pro. One of the cool things about Atmos is that the ceiling speakers are fed with genuine spatial information specified by the mixer, as opposed to fake height channels derived from other channels. Combined with GoldenEar's signature folded ribbon tweeter, this made for strong height effects, which were especially striking in the Dolby demo material. A scene from Transformers: Age of Extinction showed off the system's dynamic prowess, including the folded ribbon tweeters' ability to remain coherent at high volumes.