Help with Atmos home cinema

donmatty

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Hi guys, i need some advice/guidance on how to get an Atmos home cinema system working.

My plan is to buy the LG SJ9 sound bar, plus an LG 65" 4k TV. Link to TV here:
LG 65SK8500PLA 65" Smart 4K Ultra HD HDR LED TV

However on doing some research it doesnt look like it will be easy to get an atmos signal to the soundbar.

All my media is on network attached storage as blu ray rips. My initial plan was to use the plex app on the tv, and either ARC or the TV optical output to send the audio to the soundbar. However it seems that both ARC and optical can only send standard 5.1 to the soundbar, and none of the newer formats such as atmos or uncompressed 7.1 etc. If this is true then it kind of negates the reason for me getting all this kit as it will not really be an upgrade over my current 5.1 system?

So secondly I thought about building a dedicated pc as a media server in my living room. The modern graphics cards can send all the audio formats over HDMI so i was planning on having hdmi out from pc into the soundbar, which can then take the audio and pass the video to the TV. I use cyberlink powerdvd to watch all of my blu ray rips on pc which can handle all audio formats apart from Atmos currently, so again i wouldnt be able to get Atmos sound. Dolby atmos isnt supported by plex at the moment either.

So am i missing a trick here guys? Some sources say it depends on the tv maker if their ARC can send the newer sound formats but i cant see anything on the specifications on the LG website for the TV. Can anybody suggest any other options to help me achieve my sound dreams? I wasnt really keen on buying a dedicated audio receiver and separate speaker set, as I wanted to use the soundbar to keep everything minimalist and with less wiring.

It would be nice to also use the soundbar to play my FLAC cd rips, which are stored on a NAS. I notice the soundbar has an ethernet port, is this only for updates or can they read network file locations?

Many thanks for your comments/suggestions!
 
I've no idea how well a sound bar will reproduce Atmos, two or four correctly positioned ceiling speaks together with the usual 5.1 setup and an AV Receiver I'm sure will work better.

I use an Nvidia Shield TV which has SPMC installed, which is a fork of Kodi, which plays back Atmos and DTS-X perfectly from my server.

Unless you've ripped the correct audio tracks your ripped collection may not even contain Atmos /DTS-X but you could alway re-rip as required.
 
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