News

Dolby Showcases Leading Edge Audio Technologies used in Broadcast and Packaged Media Delivery at AES 2005 (26/5/2005)

Dolby Laboratories will be celebrating its first 40 years of enhancing entertainment at AES this year, which takes place 28-31 May 2005 at the CCIB Congress Centre in Barcelona. Dolby's booth (stand no. 3203) will focus on the future of quality audio delivery for home entertainment, including High Definition Television, high definition packaged media, and music DualDiscs.

The HD area will showcase the Dolby(R) technologies at the heart of the new generation of High Definition media, including HD television broadcast, plus the HD-DVD and Blu-ray disk formats. Technologies featured will include Dolby Digital Plus, an extension to the popular Dolby Digital format that provides even better quality whilst still at practical data rates, and lossless audio packing for "studio-quality" reproduction from HD disks. Dolby experts will be on hand to discuss the possibilities created by the new media formats, including novel new features like live internet streaming of director commentaries to accompany pre-mixed material.

Dolby staff will also be providing visitors with technical updates on the new music format, DualDisc, which features CD on one side of the disc and DVD content on the other. The DVD side may contain DVD-Audio tracks, which are encoded in MLP Lossless(TM), enabling content providers to encode up to six channels of 96kHz/24bit audio, or two channels of 192kHz/24bit audio.

Visitors to stand 3203 will also be able to see demonstrations of Dolby tools for delivering quality multichannel audio with today's digital formats, including digital broadcast and DVD. Encoding equipment on display will include Dolby E products for broadcast distribution, Dolby Digital products for DVD and digital broadcast, and Dolby Pro Logic(R) II products for conventional broadcast applications.

Off the show floor, Dolby will continue their long standing support for the AES conference by presenting some of the latest technology from their research group. Dolby Laboratories engineers Jeff Riedmiller, Charles Robinson, Alan Seefeldt, and Mark Vinton will be presenting a paper on Practical Program Loudness Measurement for Effective Loudness Control on Saturday 28 May at 2 p.m. The following day, at 3 p.m., there will be a paper on A Method for Characterizing and Identifying Audio Based on Auditory Scene Analysis, presented by Brett Crockett and Michael Smithers. Mark Vinton and Charles Robinson are due to present a further paper on Monday 30 May at 10 a.m., which will discuss Speech Recognition (SVO) for Use in Loudness Measurement.

"With exciting developments in both broadcast and packaged media, we are proud to build on our 40-year history of bringing audio technologies to market that significantly improve the entertainment experience", said Jason Power, Market Development Manager at Dolby. "AES 2005 is an ideal opportunity for us to showcase our technologies, developed to facilitate these formats and the future of excellent entertainment".

More on Dolby Digital Plus

Dolby Digital Plus is an extension of the popular Dolby Digital format, and offers coding efficiencies for systems where bandwidth is at a premium or limited, such as next-generation cable, broadcast, and satellite systems, as well as channel and bit-rate extensibility for the future. As it has been designed with backwards-compatibility in mind, broadcasters using the codec to deliver 5.1 surround sound can reach millions of homes equipped with Dolby Digital compatible DVD home cinema systems.

Where higher bit rates can be allocated for audio playback, such as in HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, Dolby Digital Plus delivers even higher quality audio performance from a highly sophisticated perceptual coding process. These extensions to the existing Dolby Digital format extend the peak data rate from 640 kbps up to 6 Mbps. Additionally, Dolby Digital Plus is designed to offer discrete channel coverage beyond the current 5.1 standard, such as 7.1 discrete channels and more.

In anticipation of future packaged media business models and format flexibility, the efficiency of Dolby Digital Plus is also designed to enable simultaneous streaming of audio content and software playback. This capability would allow consumers to watch a film while listening to an artist's or director's commentary streamed directly from the studio website, for example.

Dolby Digital Plus has also already been selected by the DVD Forum as a mandatory audio format for HD-DVD (and Blu-Ray discs TBC),has been nominated by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) as a Candidate Standard for future robust channel transmission, and named as an option by the DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) Audio-Video Coding group.

www.dolby.com