It expands on existing surround sound systems by adding height channels, interpreted as three-dimensional objects with neither horizontal nor vertical limitations.

[4][5][6] The first Dolby Atmos installation was in the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles, for the premiere of Brave in June 2012.

[10] Electronic devices from 2016 onwards, along with smartphones starting in 2017, have included support for Dolby Atmos recording and mixing capabilities.

[11] In 2016, Power was the first television show natively mixed and broadcast in Atmos for its third season, though in the same year, Game of Thrones up-mixed their previous 5.1 presentations for the Blu-ray reissue.

[13] In 2022, Dolby Atmos partnered with NetEase to offer spatial audio to the Chinese music streaming market.

[14] Dolby Atmos technology allows the storage and distribution of 128 audio tracks with metadata describing sound properties such as position and volume (and their variation over time).

Dolby Atmos in theaters has a 9.1 (commonly referred to as 7.1.2) channel-based "bed" channels for ambience stems or center dialogue, leaving 118 tracks for objects.

[15] By way of contrast, conventional multichannel technology essentially burns all the source audio tracks into a fixed number of channels during post-production.

The addition of audio objects allows the mixer to be more creative, to bring more sounds off the screen, and be confident of the results.

[26][27] In addition to playing back a standard 5.1 or 7.1 mix using loudspeakers grouped into arrays, the Dolby Atmos system can also give each loudspeaker its own unique feed based on its exact location, thereby enabling many new front, surround, and even ceiling-mounted height channels for the precise panning of select sounds such as a helicopter or rain.

[29][30] A public demonstration of Dolby Atmos in a home theater setting took place during the CEDIA Expo 2014, utilizing a Trinnov Audio Altitude 32 processor.

[31] Several audio equipment manufacturers, including Denon, Marantz, Onkyo, Pioneer, and Yamaha introduced products compatible with Dolby Atmos, ranging from high-end home cinema receivers and preamplifiers to mid-range home-theater-in-a-box (HTiB) packages.

[22] The application of Atmos in home theatres differs from cinemas primarily because of restricted bandwidth and a shortfall in processing power.

Filmmakers have control over the spatial resolution and the degree of clustering when using the Dolby Atmos Production Suite tools.

They work by using audio processing algorithms to convert the Atmos object metadata into a binaural 360° output using the usual two headphone speakers.

This technique is an improvement on the previous Dolby Headphone technology, allowing infinite channels of sound to be processed into a virtual surround experience.