I realized yesterday that it's been a good eighteen months since anyone helped me with a problem, and the help I ended up getting was so wrong that I had to develop a proprietary technique using materials and chemicals unknown to the industry at large with the help of my Ph.D biochemist father-in-law.

On the other hand, my day-to-day has essentially become hopping from one intractable problem to another across three or four different industries, roughly half or two thirds of which are for the direct benefit of someone else.

Makes a person tired.

I have decided to take the plunge and will be rebuilding the rig as an Atmos studio. Buddy of mine does Atmos for Dolby; they built me a helpful list of parts to do this that only runs about $25k. I'm cobbling mine up out of garage bits and abandoned eBay and OfferUp components and will be out of pocket maybe $1600. That's for a full 7.1.4 calibrated mess with Jellyfish and Genelecs. The computer will be more of course because Dolby Surround Tools only runs on Mac but the Mac Mini is from 2011 so it was going to need to be upgraded anyway but it means I'm going back to Pro Tools on Mac for the first time in, like, twelve years.

Got a crappy low-budg zombie movie to mix and I said "let's do it Atmos 'cuz we did the last one 5.1 and it actually allowed us to sell it for a profit." Not two weeks later and I'm doing corporate nonsense for One Of Those Companies You've Heard Of and their smell-our-own-farts celebratory Earth Day corporate video is being mixed in Atmos. So there's reason to do it. I know for a fact my pathetic little rig already kicks the tar out of Bungie's.

Gonna be hilarious, tho, until it sucks balls, because once again, there's no one to ask for advice.