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Dolby Atmos Home Theater · Kansas City.

Atmos is a room-design problem wearing a badge. IntegrateIT designs, installs and calibrates Dolby Atmos home theaters across the Kansas City metro from Overland Park, Kansas. The decisions that make one Atmos room sound like the mix and another sound like a receiver setting are all made before a speaker is chosen: how many height channels the ceiling can carry, whether those channels go in the ceiling or bounce off it, what decodes the object track, and whether anyone measures the room afterwards. Control4 Platinum Dealer with a Control4 Certified Showroom, Crestron Elite Partner, Lutron Certified Installer, CEDIA member. Phone (913) 804-7575 or office@integrateit.tech.

Below: what the three numbers in a layout actually count, the layouts from the smallest useful one to the largest a house here will hold, in-ceiling versus upfiring height channels, what decodes it, what changes in a media room, and the calibration that finishes it.

Dolby Atmos is a format, not a dealer program

Worth saying plainly, because the search results blur it. Dolby Atmos is a codec: the soundtrack carries objects with positions attached, and a processor renders those objects onto whatever speakers your room actually has. Nobody is a “Dolby dealer” — the Atmos badge on a processor is a licence the manufacturer holds, not a relationship an installer earns, which is exactly why it cannot tell you anything about the room it ends up in. A budget receiver driving two upfiring modules in a great room and a dedicated cinema with six in-ceiling channels on separate amplification both print the same word on the spec sheet.

So the useful question is never “is it Atmos?” It is how many objects in the mix land where the mix intended — and that is decided by the ceiling, the seating, the channel count and the calibration. The rest of this page is those four decisions in the order a room forces you to make them. If you are still comparing companies rather than layouts, the nine things worth demanding in writing are on our home theater page.

What the three numbers count

Every Atmos layout is written as three numbers separated by dots, and each one counts a different kind of speaker.

• The first number is the bed. The speakers at seated ear height, arranged around the room: left, centre and right across the front, then side surrounds, then rear surrounds, then front wide speakers at the top end. The centre channel is the one that carries dialogue, which is why a dedicated room puts it behind a perforated acoustically transparent screen rather than under the picture.
• The second number is subwoofers. One is a working system. Two, placed by measurement rather than by where the cabinetry allowed, is how the bass ends up roughly the same in every seat instead of loud in the middle and thin on the ends. Room modes are the reason, and they are a geometry problem before they are a gear problem.
• The third number is height channels. The overhead layer. This is the one that makes the format object-based instead of channel-based, and it is also the one a room is most likely to refuse. It is decided by the ceiling and the seating positions, not by the price of the package.

The layouts, smallest to largest

Five-point-one-point-two. Five bed speakers, one subwoofer, one pair of overheads. The smallest arrangement that does anything real with an object track, and the right answer for a modest media room or a family-room build where the overhead pair goes between the seating and the screen. Everything above this is an improvement on a layout that already works, which is worth knowing before anyone upsells you.

Five-point-one-point-four and seven-point-one-point-four. Two pairs of overheads, front and rear of the main seats, which is the first layout where sound genuinely moves across the ceiling instead of hovering in one place. Seven adds rear surrounds behind the seating, which matters most in a room with two rows. In our experience this band is where most well-built Kansas City basements land, because it is the largest layout a typical joist ceiling will hold with the angles still correct.

Seven-point-two-point-four. The same layout with a second subwoofer, and usually the best value step on this list. Two subs placed by measurement even out the modal peaks and nulls across the seating area in a way that a single larger sub cannot — the gain is in consistency between seats rather than in maximum output.

Nine-point-one-point-six and nine-point-two-point-six. Front wide speakers fill the gap between the front three and the side surrounds, and a third overhead pair gives the ceiling a front, middle and rear. This is a dedicated-room layout with a ceiling we designed rather than inherited, separate amplification per channel, and a room long enough that three overhead pairs sit at sensible angles from every seat. Put six overheads in a room that can only place four properly and the result is worse, not better — the angles collapse toward each other and the ceiling stops being a direction.

We draw the layout from the seating positions outward: main seat first, then the angles each overhead pair needs to hold from that seat and from the worst seat in the room, then what the joists, the ductwork and the lighting plan will actually allow. The number falls out of that drawing. It is not chosen first and then justified.

In-ceiling height channels, or upfiring

In-ceiling is the real thing. A speaker in the ceiling is aimed at a known point from a measured angle, and it behaves the same on day one and in year seven. Where the ceiling can be opened — new construction, a basement being finished, a remodel with the drywall already coming down — this is not a close decision. It is also the version that coexists with acoustic treatment, because an overhead speaker and a ceiling cloud can be placed around each other on a drawing instead of fighting for the same square foot.

Upfiring is a workaround, and an honest one. An upfiring module sits on a floorstanding speaker and aims at the ceiling so the sound arrives at your ears as a reflection. That makes the ceiling part of the speaker, with all that implies: it wants a flat, hard, reflective surface at an ordinary height, and it is undone by a coffered or beamed ceiling, a slope, a ceiling cloud, or a room so tall the reflection arrives late and smeared. When the ceiling is finished and staying that way, or the room is rented, or the family will not accept holes in it, upfiring is the right compromise and we will install it. We will also tell you what it costs you acoustically, which is the localisation that the overhead layer exists to provide.

The third option nobody mentions. In a room with a hard ceiling height limit, a smaller in-ceiling layout beats a larger upfiring one almost every time. Four real overheads outperform six bounced ones, and the money is better spent on the subwoofer count and the treatment than on a channel count the room cannot support. That trade-off is the single most common recommendation we make on an Atmos walk in a Johnson County basement.

What decodes it

The processor is specified to the channel count, after the layout — not before it, and not as the thing the room is designed around. For a reference dedicated cinema we carry and install Trinnov, which handles large height-channel counts and carries its own optimiser for room correction; we specify it, install it and calibrate the room around it. For rooms that want separates without going that far, we carry and install NAD Electronics, whose surround processors decode Atmos and run Dirac Live for correction. Both are lines we carry and install under distribution rather than ones we hold our own dealer agreement on, so we do not call ourselves an authorized dealer for either.

Above whichever processor the room gets sits the control layer, and this is the part that decides whether the family uses the theater. We are a Control4 Platinum Dealer with a Control4 Certified Showroom and a Crestron Elite Partner with programming done in house, so one press starts the projector, drops the screen, sets the lighting palette, selects the source and puts the processor in the right mode. A reference room operated by juggling three remotes is a worse experience than the receiver it replaced, and that is a programming failure rather than an equipment one.

One more thing the processor cannot fix: the source has to carry the track. A Kaleidescape server — we are an authorized Kaleidescape dealer carries the lossless object soundtrack a reference room is built to decode, where a streaming app hands the same processor a compressed version of it. In a room this carefully built, that difference is audible on the overhead layer first.

A media room and a dedicated room get different layouts

Both decode the same track. What separates them is how much of the room is available to the design. A dedicated room owns its ceiling, its seating positions and its light, so the overhead grid can be drawn to the geometry and the treatment can be built to a target. A media room is a space the family still uses, which means the overhead count is what the joists and the existing lighting plan allow, the screen or display has to hold up with the lights on, and the subwoofer goes where the room supports it rather than where the furniture plan preferred.

Neither is the compromised version of the other; they are two projects. If the room has one job and the ceiling is ours, the full version of it is on our dedicated-cinema page. If it has two jobs, the media-room page is the honest starting point.

What the Kansas City basement allows

Most Atmos rooms we are asked to build here are basement rooms, and the basement decides the height-channel count more often than the budget does. Finished ceiling height is the first constraint and it costs you twice. A poured nine-foot wall does not give nine feet of theater: joist bays, ductwork and the ceiling assembly come off the top, and what is left still has to absorb a second-row riser of roughly seven to twelve inches for the sight line over the front row, and still leave the overheads above and outside the seating. Under about eight feet of finished height, the honest recommendation is a smaller layout done properly.

Joist direction decides the overhead layout more than the drawing does. Speakers go between joists, so the bay spacing and the direction they run set where an overhead can physically land — and the main HVAC trunk very often runs the long dimension of the basement, straight through the projector line or the overhead grid. Rerouting it is real mechanical scope; it belongs inside the bid or explicitly outside it. Recessed lighting, the sprinkler heads in a newer build and the return air path all compete for the same ceiling, which is why the lighting plan and the speaker plan get drawn on the same sheet.

A hard ceiling is why the overhead layer needs the room treated. Poured concrete walls are a gift acoustically; the joist ceiling above you is not, and it is the surface an overhead channel depends on. The full method — first-reflection absorption, corner traps, rear diffusion, and a decoupled ceiling assembly so a ten o’clock movie is not a family event — is on our theater acoustic treatment page.

Calibration is what finishes it

An Atmos layout is a set of speakers until somebody tells the processor the truth about where they are. Every channel needs its level and its distance set from the actual listening positions, every crossover needs to match what the speaker can do, the subwoofers need to be integrated by measurement rather than by ear, and only then is room correction worth running on what is left. It happens after the seats and the acoustic treatment are in, because calibrating before that measures a room that will not exist by the time you use it.

The video half of the same visit — brightness and black level, gamma, white balance, colour, projector alignment to the screen — is a separate discipline with its own order of operations. Both halves, including what gets re-done after a laser or lamp change and what we do in theaters other companies built, are on our home theater calibration page. If a room you already own has Atmos speakers that never sounded like the demo, that page is the better starting point than this one.

We do not publish price bands for a theater, because two rooms that look identical from the doorway can be very different projects — what moves the number is in what drives the cost of a home theater. We give a fixed price after a no-cost site walk. Every install carries a five-year workmanship warranty running from the final invoice, the equipment carries its manufacturer warranty, and you have our support for as long as you own the system.

Common questions