Dolby Digital Plus Being Tweaked For Different Mobile ‘Use Cases’

A year after Dolby Labs packed its CES demo suite with surround-sound solutions for computer audio, Dolby has refocused its attention on smaller form factors including tablets and smartphones. During a press demo in New York Tuesday, John Griffin, senior marketing manager, said Dolby is targeting “new use cases” for portable audio and will announce a new content partner at CES.

At CES, Dolby will showcase partnerships with streaming content providers Vudu, Netflix, CinemaNow and Amazon, Griffin said, noting that Vudu streamed its first 7.1-channel movie, “Pirates of the Caribbean,” over the Internet in October. “Online is coming into its own delivering a high-quality HD experience with surround sound,” Griffin said.

Griffin cited CEA figures indicating 30 percent of U.S. households have home theater systems, with those skewing toward enthusiasts. Although the majority of audio/video receivers on the market have support for 7.1-channel sound, Griffin said adoption is “pretty good” among enthusiasts but the mass market area is “developing,” he said. More 7.1-channel content gives consumers more reason to add two rear speakers for the back channel, he said.

When we asked about the trend toward fewer and smaller speakers in a home theater system, especially as consumers have downsized on TV depth and components, Griffin expressed optimism that there’s room for growth for multiple-speaker systems as consumers become aware of 7.1-channel content. But he noted that Dolby technology is also found in soundbars, a single-enclosure multi-channel speaker category that’s seeing dramatic growth as consumers look to beef up TV sound without having speakers take over a room. Many soundbars can decode a Dolby signal, and “virtualize” multi-track information that then is delivered to listeners to create an “immersive experience” in the living room, he said.

Citing more CEA figures, Griffin said 34 percent of consumers considered themselves audio “enthusiasts” and another third said they had moderate interest, which translated to an interest in buying higher quality audio products on both the device and content sides, he said. Despite discussions of today’s consumer migrating to digital distribution and “having to sacrifice some audio quality,” market information indicates they want both convenience and high sound quality, he said.

The audio world reached a new reference level with Blu-ray, which can fit 7.1 channels of uncompressed audio on a single disc, with that audio then passing full-signal through an HDMI cable and on to a sound system, Griffin noted. Online content, by contrast, is constrained by limited bandwidth, which presents a challenge for Dolby in trying to deliver the full dynamic range of a multi-channel soundtrack through a pair of tiny speakers, he said. Dolby Digital Plus provides a “highly efficient solution,” not only for AV receivers and soundbars but for laptops, tablets and smartphones, he said.

Evolving content providers and new form factors are causing a constant tweaking of Dolby Digital to adjust to new technologies as they become available, Griffin noted. Online content has its own challenges such as reproduction of dialog and subtle detail that aren’t an issue with a full-blown system, he said. Loudness suffers in smaller form factors, and soundtracks with wide dynamic range that have explosions at one extreme and soft dialog at the other can be difficult to reproduce on a tablet where dialog is often unintelligible, he said.

The content community can’t remix content for each form factor, including disc players, laptops, tablets and smartphones, Griffin said. Dolby’s solution is to optimize the content through Dolby Digital to address specific use cases of each device. An audio video receiver can play back the audio mix with full dynamic range and surround sound. A tablet uses Dolby technology processes the audio to optimize it for tiny tablet speakers, he said. All Dolby decoding technologies to be used for tablets and smartphones currently exist but “we're integrating key blocks of the technology into Dolby Digital Plus so we can offer the most compelling experience for devices going forward,” Griffin said. At CES, the company will demo individual feature sets for specific devices, he said.