[Skwaidu]

I'm using the bed quite a bit, even the top as a "middle ceiling" pair (bed oh actually plays back from the middle ceiling pair ONLY in .6, so it differs from Cinematic Atmos' "array ceiling" there), but yeah I too have static object busses for front and back tops as well as the wides. On some mixes I also have a separate "object bed" route that I use in conjunction with the regular bed, just to have different bin settings available.

I've been going somewhat crazy figuring this out, and use a lot of the "immersive" reverbs, especially all things Liquidsonics and the Exponential 3D's, but I tend to gravitate most towards the ones that lets me use them more as "individual stereo" units, i.e. customize paramenters per plane to create a more realistic room. Cinematic Rooms Pro is pretty great in this regard, though Exponential gives more control to the "above bed" ceiling outputs. I do also work in a more "discrete" manner in some instances, i.e. just sending a mono or stereo element to a location/plane and have maybe just a stereo reverb or delay for it in a different place.

I also employ Halo 3D and Penteo quite often, sometimes Halo can do a pretty good job of creating an immersive reverb out of an existing wet stereo signal.

I've also gravitated towards having a "2buss" via setting up auxes and masters for all the bed and object outputs, I'm driving a send from all mix tracks to key a compressor on them (not on all styles ofc) etc. I also have Hornet's SAMP but it's not that good sounding, and also a massive resource hog.

(BTW, I tried to edit e-cue's reply out of this but the formatting went wonky - seems that I need to learn this forum!  )

I still use regular "stereo" reverbs. 3 to be precise going to 3 sets of objects, all the reverbs are fed by the same aux send but have different delay applied to them before the reverb. the front one has no delay, the middle one has a 10 ms delay, the third one in her back has a 20ms delay. I've seen somebody else using this trick to and when I tried it really liked how the reverb was traveling in the room.

for a fake stereo bus initially I was using my stereo mix of the song to key a compressor on each of the elements in the atmos mix, so that each compressor would of course react as if it was sitting on the stereo bus, but lately i stopped doing that, wasnt quiet working as well for me as i was hoping it would.
I just got the Hornet SAMP last week well and has been working fine for me but I barely tap it compression wise and I dont really use the EQ limiter or clipper in it. Resource wise it has bothered me yet and I do run the renderer on the same computer as I run PT on it and so far it has been smooth sailing.

Yeah, the stereo reverb approach works, but they are slower to tweak as you don't have "master" controls (and need to make sure that they indeed are decorrelated. I do a similar thing inside those "immersive" verbs, adding some predelay to the sides and tops, increasing RT time to the back etc.

Re: SAMP, I might also be miffed at how broken it was during launch, might need to revisit it, but in general I've found a better "groove" using the cheap Toneboosters 4 comp (which is still the only comp I know of that scales to anything from mono to 7.1.2, up to 16 channels on VST DAWs).