Dolby Executives Talk Up Atmos-Enabled Soundbars, TVs at NY Event

At a multisession briefing in New York Wednesday, introduced by Public Relations Manager Josh Gershman as “not a news event,” Dolby gave “ears-on” Dolby Atmos demonstrations to journalists, installers and industry members in cinema-level and home theater configurations. The event was used to give an “apples-to-apples comparison” between not only cinema and home versions of Dolby Atmos but also between home Atmos systems using in-ceiling and Dolby-enabled integrated speakers. Executives also addressed some of the many questions circulating about the Dolby Atmos rollout this fall.

True to its word, Dolby didn’t unbox Atmos products or give a release schedule for titles mixed in Atmos that are due to release on Blu-ray and streaming services before year-end. It did say 150 movies have been mixed in Atmos for the cinema, mostly of the “blockbuster” type. While Dolby used pre-master demo material from Star Trek Into Darkness and other trailers, executives repeatedly said they were offered for demo purposes only and “not a commitment by the studio” that a title is coming out in Atmos for home video.

The two front- and two rear-enabled speakers Dolby used for its home Atmos demo were “white-labeled prototypes,” Product Marketing Manager Peter Razukas told us. The Atmos-Enabled drivers were integrated into the speaker cabinet, but the other option for Atmos-Enabled speakers is an add-on module with the height driver that wires into a conventional speaker via binding posts on the back of the speaker cabinet. Some modules will cosmetically match the speakers they're paired with, such as one upcoming model from Definitive Technology, said Craig Eggers, director-content creation and playback for Dolby’s home theater ecosystem, while others have separate modules built to cosmetically match the speakers they're paired with. Modules, which could be placed on a shelf, should be placed at ear level, Eggers said, and at least three feet from the listener to avoid localization.

We asked Eggers if it would be possible to make Atmos-enabled AV receivers with an add-on module similar to the ones offered by TV companies including Samsung and Sony to keep their electronics current as model years change. While early-release 2014 receivers from Onkyo, Pioneer and Yamaha, for example, will be upgradeable to Dolby Atmos through a firmware upgrade in the fall, older receivers can’t be upgraded, Eggers said. Denon and Marantz are “not pursuing an upgrade strategy” but will be Atmos-ready “out of the box” when they do ship, Eggers said. For Atmos, Dolby had to build new versions of the Dolby Digital Plus and the Dolby Digital decoders, a rendering block and make changes to the HDMI transport protocol for transfer of metadata, he said. None of those components is part of a legacy AV receiver, he said. Firmware-upgradable receiver makers have to submit their firmware to Dolby for approval before they can announce the upgrade, Eggers said.

Eggers said the Atmos-enabled speakers are a new licensing business for Dolby. Previously, speakers were essential to the implementation of surround-sound systems, but Dolby hadn’t taken an active role in how they're designed. On criteria for Atmos-enabled speakers, Eggers said, “What we did not want to do was to tell speaker manufacturers how to build their product,” he said. Instead, Dolby “is about ensuring you get a certain level of performance,” he said. Documentation for the speaker prescribes a certain angle for a speaker to achieve the desired height effect and necessary filtering to ensure that sound coming from the add-on driver isn’t directional, he said. Drivers could be 3 or 4 1/2 inches or “any number” of sizes, he said. For certification, companies submit a post-engineering sample for initial approval and another sample if changes were required prior to mass-production, Eggers said.

A priority for Dolby in bringing Atmos home was making it “fit into the current space,” Eggers said. Many of the AV receivers in the market are 7.1-channel configurations but only 35 percent of those have seven speakers connected, he said, citing company research and user forums. He said, “5.1 is still a major component of the home theater experience.” So basic versions of Atmos will be 5.1.2 systems with the two height speakers overhead, he said. Dolby made “scalability and adaptability key parts of the Atmos message, enabling manufacturers to expand from the base-level 5.1.2 to 5.1.4, 7.1.2 or 7.1.4 configurations, Eggers said. Maximum for the format is 24.1.10, he said.

Dolby executives sent mixed messages on how the Atmos concept will be best conveyed to consumers in an age when effective product demos at the point of sale are increasingly hard to come by. Brett Crockett, senior director-research sound technology in Dolby’s Advanced Technology Group, used his own anecdotal experience shopping for a turntable online based on Amazon reviews as an ideal model for shopping for premium audio gear via the Internet. He said online shopping is “easier” largely because of return policies. Eggers, meanwhile, pushed the retail store route. “We've had conversations with a lot of retailers since CES,” Eggers said, “and I think they get it.” Atmos is a technology “that demands an experience,” Eggers said. “We're not going to be successful with this if the product just sits on shelves not connected."

In bringing Dolby Atmos to the home, surround audio has “broken away from the paradigm of channels and speakers,” said Crockett. Borrowing an often-used phrase from the early days of home theater, Crockett said Dolby Atmos plays back a soundtrack “exactly the way the filmmaker wanted you to hear it.” What’s different in the age of Atmos is that “it’s not about the number of channels or number of speakers,” Crockett said. “It’s the renderer custom-making it for the room.” The scalable model enables the same Atmos experience whether in a “3,000-seat theater with 64 speakers,” a screening room or a home theater, Crockett said. A total of 128 objects are represented in Dolby Atmos soundtracks, and all 128 are included in the home mix, Crockett said, because cutting out audio objects would be “like cutting out characters. It’s not the vision of the director for us to pare back.” Dolby developed “spatial coding” to fit the number of objects and their location in files that can be decoded through enhanced TrueHD for Blu-ray and Dolby Digital Plus for streaming services, he said.

In addition to the likely confusion over Dolby-enabled Atmos speakers in integrated and separate form factors and in ceiling speaker options, consumers will also need to be educated about implementation. Eggers implored journalists to get the word out about two critical aspects it wants to communicate to consumers in setting up a Dolby Atmos system at home. First, he said, is taking the soundtrack’s bitstream out from a Blu-ray player or game console for decoding inside the Atmos-enabled AV receiver, he said. Eggers said the PS4 has bitstream-out capability but didn’t address the Xbox One. “That’s where the rendering, scaling and adaptability of Dolby Atmos takes place,” he said. Second, consumers will have to turn off secondary audio, which allows users to bring in director commentary from a disc or server. If consumers leave secondary audio on, “you're not going to get the Dolby Atmos experience,” he said.

Eggers cited opportunities for online retailers to do “some really great education behind Dolby Atmos,” he said. He noted the amount of effort Dolby is putting into what the company is calling the future of sound, saying in his 10 years at Dolby he hasn’t seen as many resources -- FAQs, white papers, training documents for partners and retailers -- thrown at a technology to help consumers understand “what it is and how to connect it.” The resources haven’t been released but Dolby is eyeing CEDIA Expo as a launching pad for an installer’s guide and training.

On potential confusion with high-resolution audio, which has the visible support of CEA, Eggers asked rhetorically if there’s a reason why Dolby Atmos isn’t considered high-resolution audio. He said: “If I were a retailer, I'd be demonstrating high-resolution audio and Dolby Atmos to my consumer during those events.”

To date, Dolby has talked about traditional in-wall and cabinet loudspeakers as candidates for Dolby Atmos -- along with headphones -- leaving many to assume that the technology is in competition with the soundbar that has taken over the sound-for-TV market. Eggers said Dolby, in developing technologies, experiments with a lot of different speaker configurations, and the soundbar is one of them. As part of its research, “we are thinking about how we can integrate Dolby Atmos into soundbars,” Eggers said. Dolby has had meetings and demonstrations with partners to discuss what it would take to bring Atmos to a soundbar product, he said. The conciliatory position appears to be one of market reality, as Eggers called the category’s surging sales “a reaction to the fact that display products have become fashion statements.” Retailers and TV companies have been bundling soundbars as a “solution to bad sound coming from the TV,” he said, saying there are “various levels of soundbar quality” on the market. An Atmos-enabled soundbar is “still a work in progress,” Eggers said, declining to say when one would be available.

On whether Dolby might launch branded product to bank off its name at the cinema level, Eggers said the goal with Dolby-Enabled speakers is to “help grow the business” and the company “immediately” began to speak with speaker manufacturers early on in the 2 1/2-year design cycle of the home Atmos product. “We have no plans with the Dolby-enabled speakers to bring a Dolby product to market,” he said. Regarding building Dolby Atmos into a TV, Eggers said, “maybe someday,” but a TV would require more processing power for rendering and decoding, he said. In today’s competitive TV environment, “you'd have to have cost efficiencies on the silicon side,” Eggers said, “but I wouldn’t rule out in the future” someone building Atmos into a TV, he said.