What crucial dimension was largely absent in previous home theater standards but characterizes immersive sound?
Answer
The height dimension
Traditional surround sound systems, such as 5.1 and 7.1, were fundamentally designed around a two-dimensional plane defined by the placement of speakers surrounding the listener—front, side, and rear. While these formats created immersion horizontally, they largely ignored the vertical axis. A defining characteristic of modern immersive audio formats is the conscious introduction and utilization of the height dimension. This allows sounds to convincingly originate from above the listener, such as rain falling or an aircraft flying overhead, moving the auditory experience far beyond the flat plane established by legacy channel-based configurations.
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