Dolby Atmos is my favorite audio format available today. Pretty much every major 4K Blu-ray release comes with an Atmos track, and I’m grateful for that. I went through the trouble of putting a Dolby Atmos sound system in my living room, so it’s always nice to find something that takes advantage of all my speakers, especially the height channels.

If you’ve been in the 4K physical media game for a while, you might remember another audio format. While you can still find it around here and there, it feels like DTS:X is being phased out. If it’s a major release, more often than not it’ll be a Dolby Atmos track instead of a DTS:X one, aside from some exceptions, like Arrow’s Carlito’s Way release in late 2025. This wasn’t a sudden shift, but it was more something that happened gradually.

What’s more interesting is that some re-releases have gotten rid of the existing DTS:X soundtrack. The Jurassic Park 4K used to have a DTS:X soundtrack, but the latest release got rid of that in favor of an Atmos one. Strangely, the previous track isn’t even offered as an alternative — it’s just gone entirely.

DTS:X feels like it’s being phased out

A slow death indeed

I want to be clear that I’m a fan of DTS:X. It takes advantage of the same speakers that the Atmos soundtracks do, and it’s a directional-based audio format. Both Atmos and DTS:X sound excellent, but in a battle between the two, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Atmos is coming out on top. It’s not even that one is far better than the other, either. It just feels like Dolby is winning out in the public perception battle, and it’s just an easier sell to plop the Dolby name on something than it is DTS. I mean, if you look around you’ll see things like Dolby Theater and Dolby Cinema branding movie theater chains, and that’s somewhere DTS can’t compete.

A lot of this industry is about branding and licensing, and it looks like Dolby wins out big time in that area. I have an Apple TV 4K, and as much as I love it, there’s no audio passthrough. That means that whatever the box is capable of spitting out, that’s what I get. At the high-end, there’s only Dolby Atmos and no DTS:X in sight. If the best streaming box on the market doesn’t have DTS:X, what hope is there for anything else?’

A lot of times, you see something get pushed out because of quality reasons, but that’s not what happened here. DTS:X is still a great format, but it just doesn’t stand out among Atmos. It’s similar to HD-DVD and Blu-ray. It’s not that HD-DVD was bad, it’s just that Blu-ray beat it out. I’m just glad DTS:X is finding a way to hang on for a little while longer, but its future seems sort of grim from where I’m looking.

Even when you leave behind the physical media world, you’ll still see that Atmos largely dominates streaming. On top of that, much like the Apple TV, many TV brands don’t even include DTS:X as an audio format. Receivers will still have you covered, but that just adds another piece of tech you need to buy to get it.

Atmos winning isn’t bad, but it’s not great either

More choices are always good

If Atmos continues on this path, it’s difficult to imagine DTS:X gaining much of a foothold. It’s already a massive uphill battle, and the Atmos machine keeps on churning. Dolby feels like it’s taking over in every area of home media. Dolby Vision has thoroughly outpaced HDR10+, and Atmos reigns supreme in the audio world.

This isn’t a bad thing because these are two great formats, but it’d be nice to see a little more competition. I don’t want to see any complacency, and that’s something that happens when there’s nothing encouraging a company to continue pushing forward. To be fair, Dolby hasn’t been doing that, and Dolby Vision 2 looks quite promising — although it’s something that 4K Blu-ray won’t be taking advantage of any time soon.

I do wonder what the future of Atmos and audio formats in general looks like. It feels like there’s nowhere left to go now that we’ve introduced proper height channels into the mix. Between Atmos and DTS:X, it seems that all the bases have been covered. I guess that’s why I’m not somebody who’s coming up with these ideas, because I’m sure there are some improvements to be made somewhere. Whatever the future holds, I hope the quality remains high. If this is DTS:X’s swan song, then I’ll remember it fondly.

There’s not a disc in my collection that has a DTS:X track that I don’t enjoy. I might even enjoy the older Jurassic Park mix more than the current one, but both are great. Maybe it’d be better if people had a real choice between Atmos and DTS instead of just seeing Atmos everywhere, but that’s the way things have played out.