Updated Dolby Digital Plus to Arrive in Tablets by Holiday Season

Dolby held private listening sessions at CE Week where it previewed a version of Dolby Digital Plus that’s optimized for tablets and smartphones. Tablets and poorly positioned speakers, facing to the back or where a user’s hands would typically be, along with inexpensive amplifiers, have produced a sub-par entertainment experience for movies and music in the first two years of the tablet market, Kevin Brennan, Dolby director of marketing, e-media, told us. The next iteration of Dolby Digital Plus, expected to hit tablets in time for the holiday season, will bring characteristics of Dolby Digital surround sound for the 10-foot living room experience to the seven- and 10-inch tablet, he said.

Portable is the “next frontier” for enabling the same immersive surround-sound experience found in home theater playback systems, Brennan said. That’s largely out of necessity as consumers continue to move away from physical discs and the equipment that plays them and toward a streaming world where content is stored in the cloud, he said. Dolby executives have discussed the need in earnings calls to capitalize on the growing mobile electronics market as sales of DVD players continue to fall off and as optical disk drives will be an option, not a required part, of the Windows 8 world. “That leaves the opportunity for mobile,” and it'll be a huge one globally at an estimated 1 billion smartphones and 300 million tablets in a couple of years, Brennan said.

Brennan maintained there’s market demand for better sounding audio on tablets and smartphones. He cited a CEA study of consumer expectations regarding tablets, in which a third of those surveyed identified themselves as audio enthusiasts but only 10 percent were “highly satisfied” with the entertainment experience supplied by tablets. Dolby wants to bridge that gap, he said.

Dolby demoed the technology on a Samsung Galaxy tablet. Brennan wouldn’t disclose which would be the first tablet maker to employ the tweaked Dolby Digital technology. Companies incorporating a previous version of Dolby Digital in tablets -- one optimized only for the living room experience -- include Acer, Fujitsu, ZTE and Lenovo, Brennan said. The Dolby Digital Plus software is upgradeable, but not by the user, Brennan said, since Dolby engineers work with each hardware OEM to “tune the technologies to the specific characteristics of each device.” Dolby can “push an upgrade out as an over-the-air update,” he said, but it’s not something the consumer can buy as an app because each version of Dolby Digital has been customized to a particular device. OEMs could choose to make those updates available to customers, he said.

Digital content from most aggregators is ripped from content that’s mastered with the assumption that the consumer is “listening in the living room on a more capable device,” Brennan said. As a result, volume levels are typically set “way too soft” for a tablet with tiny speakers. In the upgraded version, Dolby is addressing acoustical problem areas in tablets including the quality of sound, dialog intelligibility, soundstage and volume leveling both over a tablet’s built-in speakers and when using headphones, Brennan said.

In our demo, which included a clip from The Incredibles, Dolby Digital Plus raised the entire volume level, and we found dialog intelligibility to be raised appreciably versus content not decoded with the new Dolby Digital Plus. Dolby has target volume levels built into its algorithms for portable devices, and if volume is below a set level “we will bring it up to that,” Brennan said. A Dolby-enhanced clip from The Tudors brought out detail in the soundtrack that wasn’t there with Dolby turned off, including horses’ hooves, birds chirping and a dog barking off screen. The end result made this listener feel more involved in the scene.

Dolby also intends to grab the encoding opportunity at the content creation stage where content is produced and distributed at different quality levels, Brennan said. Everyone in the ecosystem of multimedia playback on a portable device -- a movie studio, wireless carrier and hardware maker -- “should be thinking about the sound quality produced by smartphones and tablets,” he said. What happens between the creation of an audio soundtrack and the time it arrives to a device for playback, including how much transcoding and compression and decompression it goes through, affects the overall sound, he said. When bit rates below 128-kpbs are used, the audio “starts to suffer,” he said. Dolby provides tools for capturing the audio soundtracks and works with distributors and aggregators, including iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, Vudu and CinemaNow, which all use Dolby to enable surround sound for the living room, he said. All smart TVs and Xbox 360 and PS3 game consoles use Dolby Digital Plus he said, calling it the “de facto standard” for delivering “high-quality surround-sound to the living room.”