Speaker Makers Hopeful, Cautious, On In-Home Future of Dolby Atmos

The imminent arrival of Dolby Atmos-enabled AV receivers (AVRs) is eliciting cautious interest from speaker makers who could benefit from a bump in speaker sales if the technology spurs consumers to upgrade their home theater systems. At the same time, speaker makers have seen a dramatic shift away from standard 5.1 surround-sound system sales in recent years as consumers have opted for a simpler single-enclosure soundbar to replace thin sound from flat-panel TVs.

"It remains to be seen” whether consumers who have shunned 5.1 systems will be open to buying into a surround-sound concept that adds height channels to create what Dolby calls a more immersive experience, Sandy Gross, president of Definitive Technology told Consumer Electronics Daily. Definitive has been studying the Atmos concept since Dolby proposed it Dolby a year and a half ago, and the company plans an Atmos demo at CEDIA Expo in September, Gross said.

But Definitive’s demo approach is a safe one, using its ceiling-mount speakers to create a system with four such speakers in what Gross called a “full-bore” demo. “We want to show how good Atmos can be,” he said. Using discrete ceiling speakers doesn’t require speaker certification by Dolby or the need to create new SKUs incorporating the dual-driver “Dolby-enabled” speaker design that includes an upward-firing driver to spray sound for the height channels. Gross said Definitive is “still evolving the concept” of Dolby-enabled speakers and hasn’t made a commitment to producing them.

Pioneer, which makes both Atmos-enabled AVRs and speakers, has a lot to gain from the new technology in the face of the industry’s declining AVR sales. Pioneer Chief Speaker Designer Andrew Jones had his doubts about the technology the first time he went to Dolby for an Atmos demo, Jones told us. “At first I was a skeptic,” Jones said, recalling looking at a 5.1-channel system with four speakers mounted in the ceiling. “I told them I can’t even get half the people to put in 5.1 speakers in decent locations,” Jones said. He also said companies can’t count on retail support to teach consumers about new AV technologies. “A lot of stores don’t even demonstrate it,” he said of surround sound. “They line up all the speakers beneath the TVs,” he said, and “now you're asking them to mount four more speakers and run wires to them.”

"Yeah, right,” was Jones’ first reaction when Dolby engineers explained the dual-driver solution for left and right Dolby-enabled speakers. But he is now encouraging Dolby to push that solution over discrete ceiling speakers. Jones conceded that part of his support for the floor-standing or bookshelf Dolby-enabled speaker approach was distribution based. In-ceiling speakers are largely the realm of the custom installation market “and we can’t really support” it, Jones said. The floor-standing speaker approach is “the simple system” and it shouldn’t be downplayed or made to be inferior to the discrete in-ceiling speaker option, he said. Dual-driver front speakers are “equally good if not better” and “I actually prefer it,” Jones said. Definitive Technology, by contrast, has a strong presence in the custom electronics market, and Gross prefers the installed ceiling speaker approach largely for that reason.

Dolby published the rationale for its object-oriented Atmos format, which adds a height dimension to the surround-sound experience. In a lab notes section (http://bit.ly/1mGRZHI) of the Dolby website, Brett Crockett, director of sound research, said Dolby used “psychoacoustics and sound physics” to develop speakers that can create “overhead sound even though they're only a few feet off the floor.” The speakers fire sound upward, where it reflects off the ceiling “to produce an incredibly lifelike recreation of overhead sound."

Crockett said consumers who can’t mount ceiling speakers can opt for the two speakers in one enclosure -- with one set of drivers directed upward -- that has a second set of binding posts, for running an extra pair of speaker wires. On how Pioneer will market the need for an extra set of wires, Jones said, “We're trying to say it’s simple. If you're already used to 5.1, it’s just four more cables,” he said. When we asked if the company expected consumer pushback on the extra wires, Jones said, “It’s better than having to put them in the ceiling.”

Consumers who can’t mount speakers in the ceiling (including those with vaulted ceilings that don’t provide the proper reflection pattern) can use Dolby Atmos-enabled speaker modules. The modules mount on top of conventional speakers or can be placed on a nearby surface, said Crockett.

On room for differentiation among Dolby-certified speakers, Jones told us, “You design whatever speaker you want and include a top driver.” Dolby showed examples to audio engineers using a single full-range driver, but Jones took a different tack. “If I was going to do this, I was going to use a concentric driver,” he said, citing his own signature driver design that he’s used in speakers from KEF, Pioneer and TAD. Putting a concentric driver in the top makes “a strong statement” and “gives me more control over the frequency response beyond what I could get from a single driver,” he said.

That’s a lot of attention to sound quality for an effects-channel speaker, Jones conceded, but he compared the design to that of a stereo system where the voice comes as a phantom image between the two speakers. “You believe there is a sound coming from the middle,” Jones said, and “you only get a good center image if both speakers are identical in frequency and phase response.” Locking the sonic image to the desired location requires matching the frequency response and phase response, he said.

Similarly, Dolby’s object-oriented approach for Atmos means “they encode where the sound is supposed to come from,” he said. The processor inside the AV receiver recognizes the speaker configuration via metadata, and “knows it has to fit ... x, y, z signals to each speaker so that the phantom image comes from the right point in space,” Jones said. “You can only do that most successfully if all the speakers involved have the same frequency response, phase response and a well-controlled off-axis response,” which is “exactly what a concentric driver does,” Jones said. By using concentric drivers for the front and effects channels, Jones believes he can get a superior soundstage. That soundstage will be on display at Best Buy, said Jones, saying Pioneer initially will be the only Atmos speaker system demoed at Magnolia Home Theater stores.

The Dolby spec allows for Jones’ approach, “and they made it loose enough” to enable speaker designers to deliver Dolby Atmos in affordable home-theater-in-a-box (HTiB) systems for mainstream consumers, Jones said. The irony of that, he said, is that “those are the very people who are never going to do this anyway.”

We took it a step further and asked Jones whether an Atmos speaker could be designed in a soundbar or sound base that combined all drivers in a single enclosure. “If they could, game over,” Jones said. “Everybody who is not going to invest in a real sound system, if they could get some impression of that from a soundbar product, I'll be the first to sign up for that,” he said. Dolby hasn’t clued in licensees “on what other things they're working on other than the 5.1.2 or 5.1.4 approach,” Jones said. Dolby didn’t respond to questions, including whether a spec for a soundbar was in the works.

While Definitive Technology is focusing on the higher end of the market with its Atmos-ready products, Gross sees a market for an Atmos-enabled soundbar. “We haven’t been told specifically, but I believe that the way a soundbar would do this would be with electronic processing,” Gross said. “That would be interesting,” he said. He added that in discussions with his engineers, it would be possible to do electronic processing “to achieve the whole [Atmos] system” without having speakers on the ceiling or bouncing sound off the ceiling. That could “approximate the experience,” he said. “It would be terrific if that technology were fully developed and incorporated into the receivers because then people would be able to have this Atmos experience without having to change or have special speaker systems to indulge in it,” he said.

Now Hear This (NHT) signed on as a Dolby licensee and will probably do “one model of each” approach to Atmos-enabled speakers, NHT President Chris Byrne told us. That includes up-firing Atmos modules that can be attached to existing speakers. Byrne is intrigued by the Atmos system’s flexibility and by what “sound designers are going to be able to do for the first time” with height effects, he said. “It could be a much more realistic thing,” he said, saying some audiophiles have been negative toward the nascent technology. “Whether or not it will be adopted 100 percent, I don’t see how you avoid being involved,” he said as a speaker manufacturer. Even consumers with a “little 5.1 rig,” can upgrade to Dolby Atmos with a Dolby-enabled speaker, he said. “You may not get everything that a full Atmos system gives you, but you can get a fair amount with a couple of add-on speakers that hang on the wall and fire up at the ceiling,” he said.

The relationship between Dolby and speaker makers is new, and Dolby’s expectations have been a bit naive, Byrne said, citing royalty agreements. “They have cutoffs for royalty payments where it gets very cheap at 25,000 [units] per quarter,” he said. “Nobody sells 25,000 of anything a year, much less a quarter,” he said.

NHT won’t convert its entire speaker line for Atmos, Byrne said, and will likely produce offshoots of its existing line. “The last thing I want is more SKUs,” he said. But tweaking an existing design for Atmos can be “fairly inexpensive” if companies “take an existing design that works,” he said. Redesigning a cabinet in a way that allows for a second driver and cavity and “doesn’t look ridiculously ugly” is NHT’s challenge, “and we have some thoughts about that,” Byrne said. He estimates an adaptation would run “a few grand.” The additional driver “shouldn’t be more than $100 at retail,” he said, the same price he expects for add-on Atmos modules at retail. Byrne envisioned a wall-hanging or shelf-mounted add-on module, “or if we're really clever, we can figure out a way to do both,” he said.

A speaker executive who asked to remain anonymous told us, “I don’t think anybody really knows how well consumers are going to embrace the concept or not embrace the concept” of Atmos. He visited dealers to get their assessment of Atmos and found a range of reactions. “Some thought it was Looney Tunes and others thought it was interesting,” he said. How Dolby Atmos speaker sales develop could come down to the issue facing the Ultra HD TV business right now, which is content, he said. “It’s very hard to say what’s going to happen because of timing,” he said. “They don’t have any program material yet, and they're launching this concept into an arena with no program material, which may dramatically hurt the launch,” he said.