Your holiday talking points start here.

You’ve had all offseason to relax. Now it’s time to get in shape for conversation season. From Thanksgiving to the Super Bowl, it’ll be one conversation-intensive occasion after another. Family gatherings. In-law summits. New Year’s parties. Office parties. Aside from the occasional bye week, your mouth will be running more or less continuously.

It’s going to take a lot of preparation to sidestep the twin pitfalls of awkward silence and awkward shouting. You can spend half an hour a week catching up on the current NFL storylines. You can trawl through showbiz news sites for the latest on the celebrity power couples. You can flip through a car magazine or a fashion magazine at the grocery store. But you’re gonna need more. You’re gonna need to go deeper. You need something of your own.

Enter 3D audio. That’s what Dolby Atmos is, as we’ve explained at length before. With an Atmos-enabled receiver (not included) and Atmos-enabled content (not hard to find), you’ll hear an overhead audio channel in addition to regular surround sound’s front, side, and back channels. It takes the flat horizontal sound field of surround sound and adds a new vertical dimension to it.

These speakers have an extra upward-firing speaker for the new vertical channels when 7.1 surround sound becomes 5.1.2 Atmos 3D sound. That’s Atmos, that’s 3D audio, and now chances are people at your next holiday gathering won’t know as much about it as you do.

You could start laying the conversational groundwork now. Email a link to this page to that brother-in-law or niece of yours who is kind of into tech stuff. Here, we’ll even write it for you:

Hey (RECIPIENT)! What do you know about this Dolby Atmos 3D Audio at meh.com? Looks interesting. Anyway, see you at (HOLIDAY)!

Couldn’t be easier. Then again, maybe you want to save all your material for maximum impact on the day itself. Your call. But you know what would really fill your gab-tanks with condensed conversational material? If you actually bought a set of Atmos speakers yourself. You can buy a receiver and talk about how amazing that vertical Atmos dimension sounds. Or wait and talk about how you’re shopping for a really good Atmos receiver. Either approach lets you blather on at length without a whiff of politics, religion, or sex.

When you’re in deep chit-chat this holiday season, when you’re up talk creek without a paddle, let these Pioneer Atmos Speakers float you to safe, uncontroversial shores. Oh, they also sound pretty good, too. Did we not mention that?