Dolby Looking To Monopolize Consumer Audio By Restricting Its Codec (audioholics.com) 158
Audiofan writes from a report via Audioholics, written by Gene DellaSala: Variety is said to be the spice of life. Why only eat cherry Starbursts when you can sample orange, watermelon, lemon, etc? The same applies to multi-channel surround sound upmixers. But the folks at Dolby apparently want you to eat only one flavor. Their flavor. Dolby recently issued a mandate to all of their Atmos licensee partners to restrict usage of third-party upmixers with any Dolby signals including 5.1/7.1 DD, DD+, TrueHD and Atmos. That means if you're running a DTS Soundbar, it won't process a Dolby signal, or no dice if you want to use the Auro-Matic Upmixer for a native Dolby signal. Is Dolby doing this to protect their IP or to monopolize consumer audio like they tried to do with their patented Atmos-enabled speaker? The copy of the mandate that was sent to all of Dolby's licensee partners has the following guidelines: Native Dolby Atmos content shall NOT be up-mixed, surround or height virtualized by any 3rd party competitor upmixer (ie. DTS or Auro-3D); Channel-Based DD/DD+, Dolby TrueHD 5.1 and 7.1 codecs shall not be height virtualized by any 3rd party upmixer (ie. DTS). (This implies height virtualization without height speakers. DTS has this capability but Auro-3D does not).
Audioholics notes the company will however "permit third party upmixing and/or surround virtualization of channel-based codecs that support Dolby Atmos rendering as long as the third party doesn't license their own upmixing technologies to third parties."
As for why Dolby is issuing this mandate to its licensees, it may come down to two reasons: control quality of content so that their upmixer is only used with their software; put an end to Auro-3D and strike a blow to DTS.
Audioholics notes the company will however "permit third party upmixing and/or surround virtualization of channel-based codecs that support Dolby Atmos rendering as long as the third party doesn't license their own upmixing technologies to third parties."
As for why Dolby is issuing this mandate to its licensees, it may come down to two reasons: control quality of content so that their upmixer is only used with their software; put an end to Auro-3D and strike a blow to DTS.
My give a damn can't be upmixed (Score:3)
Why is this a big deal? Are people really affected by this or us it just on principle?
Re: My give a damn can't be upmixed (Score:5, Informative)
dolby is the reason you still cant use your 5.1 speakers properly. hopefully this kills them.
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I have two 60 year old piezoelectric speakers and they are awesome.
Needless to say, your comment does nothing to help. People with ear buds or beats headphones seem typical these days. This ain't hurting them.
Re: My give a damn can't be upmixed (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah I know. My family regularly goes into the living room and we all sit down for a lovely movie night. We only have one headphone socket so we share the Beats headphones and then sit down after and each person tells the rest what happened in their 1/5th of the movie.
The only really difficult thing about this is coming up with such a silly post to rival yours.
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In my house we can afford more than one pair of headphones.
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Oh that part is easy. Just daisy chaining Y adapters makes for a very quiet experience.
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In my house we can afford more than one pair of headphones.
But that wouldn't help at all if you carefully read the parent post -- "We only have one headphone socket"
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It's a bit like a "trousers".
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thegarbz quipped:
Yeah I know. My family regularly goes into the living room and we all sit down for a lovely movie night. We only have one headphone socket so we share the Beats headphones and then sit down after and each person tells the rest what happened in their 1/5th of the movie.
I know you're just being facetious, but, in my home studio, I use the Sterling Audio S204HA [sterlingaudio.net] 4-channel headphone amplifier, when multiple musicians need to hear the same monitor mix simultaneously.
(Sterling also makes an 8-channel version, and there are plenty of other competitors in the same space, as well ... )
Smartphone vs home theater (Score:5, Informative)
People with ear buds or beats headphones seem typical these days. This ain't hurting them.
Those people are indeed most likely to listen to music from their smartphone.
Appart from the oddballs (Apple own patents on AAC and thus pretty much does whatever they want with it),
nearly all the smartphone/app/internet/webapp ecosystem has been taken over by OPUS an openstandars and open source high qality codec (beats nearly everything else, the only exception being the extreme low bandwidth which doesn't fit the internet use-cases).
Close to all modern apps (be it for voice calls or for music) have shifthed to this (with the high visible exception of Spotify, they started with Vorbis, OPUS' predecessor open source web standart).
Because most of the internet and app devs got fed up with the licensing shenanigans formerly around MP3 and then around AAC.
So most of these people won't give a damn about Dolby, and multi channel speaker upmixing (they only have 2 channels to begin with anyway). That technology got excised out of the mobile scene.
The problem is the home theater, home cinema, TV, etc.
These are the people having multi-speaker setup, and the TV world seems much more entrenched into older standard (e.g.: MPEG's video and audio codecs, Dolby's and DTS' codecs for sound, etc.)
These are the people affected by the licensing shenanigans of Dolby.
Of course Dolby *has* an excuse : they don't want their logo stuck on a piece of shitty hardware that does catastrophic multi-channel sound generation, and then only use Dolby to stream the badly distorted noise to the speaker system : that will ruin Dolby's reputation due to factors that have nothing to do with their technology.
The problem is that in practice, Dolby will most likely abuse the duopoly they have (together with DTS) in the movie audio market to mostly try to make sure to get some money out of every bit of sound played together with any movie.
But Dolby should be paying attention to what happened with OPUS on the internet/smartphone market.
If they start pissing way to many people with their licensing practice, they might be next.
Netflix, Youtube, Amazon, etc. : nowadays the various streaming platforms represent together a bigger market share than the classical TV channels and satellite cable networks together.
They come from a more internet oriented background. They got fed up with MPEG's licensing bullshit, and they banded together with all the other members behind AOMedia, and sent a giant collective "fuck you" to MPEG in the form of AV-1 codec.
Nowadays, there's no technical reason why Dolby should be important in the TV market.
There used to be a technical restriction in the past making it mandatory to use DTS or Dolby to transmit the audio to the speaker system : there's only so much data that you can cram within the fixed ~1.0-1.5Mbps bandwidth of SPDIF and TOSLink. You need to compress it to transmit it, and Dolby and DTS managed to get into the home theater market due to their presence in the commercial movie theaters. This made possible to have Video Laser Discs (on their digital track), then DVDs and now current media and streams that contain a standard format that can be streamed straight to the audio receiver.
But nowadays with standards like HDMI, that can pipe multiple uncompressed streams to the audio receiver, the Dolby or DTS compressions make a lot less sense.
A movie streaming app running on the smartTV/HDMI stick/set top box could fetch audio in any format it want (including the above mentioned OPUS), decompress it, optionally up-mixes it if the user has more speakers in their home cinema than what is streamed, and send it as raw uncompressed audio the speaker system, without Dolby ever being involved at any sstep.
Dolby should watch out to not piss off the market because some player (mostly the modern movie streaming platform) could pretty well do exactly that.
Huh? (Score:3)
Advanced Audio Coding [wikipedia.org]
FairPlay [wikipedia.org] was done so the record
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Atmos is mostly an attempt to goose sales into a saturated durable-goods market -- much like 3D TV and 4k.
Few people will ever care about Atmos, which adds yet more speakers for subtle effects for which there is little content available - and likely won't be for a long time if ever.
Lots of people care about 5.1, which is simply classic "surround sound" with a subwoofer. "Height Virtualized" sounds to me like contriving something to send to the extra Atmos channels for non-native content, just so someone wh
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I have two 60 year old piezoelectric speakers and they are awesome.
Needless to say, your comment does nothing to help. People with ear buds or beats headphones seem typical these days. This ain't hurting them.
Your mom.
Are you on psychotropic drugs or something? Seriously, what does this drivel have to do with anything?
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The last time this came up I said something similar and people talked about SPDIF out on PCs. Said you couldn't generate your own 5.1 and squirt it out to your 5.1 speakers.
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You would think so but with the disaster that CEC/ARC can be in the TV world a lot of people are using an optical connection between their TV and soundbar.
I am still using an old receiver without HDMI, so the only way to get digital audio into it from my movies from some devices is to take the optical audio out of my TV.
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squiggleslash inquired:
Can you expand on this? This is the first time I've heard that Dolby is preventing anyone from using 5.1 speakers. At least ten to twenty years ago pretty much every 5.1 system worked fine, what's changed, or what was I missing 10-20 years ago?
It's a genuine question, I suspect there's some context here I'm missing.
They're not.
What they are doing is to try to use their technology licensing contracts to forbid manufacturers who signed those contracts - without which they're unable to employ Dolby's still-patent-protected algorithms to properly decode (which is to say "play") Dolby-encoded video and audio - from employing third-party technology to upmix stereo audio for 5.1 playback.
It's very much a monopolist dick move, which sucks for reasons I detail in my response to the assertion that there'
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Why would I want 5.1? Can't I just use 6 speakers? What good is one tenth of a speaker?
The summary itself was gibberish to me, it should have come with with a glossary.
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It's not really about a tenth of a speaker, but about an audio channel with a tenth of the bandwidth because it is restricted to low frequencies. Because of that frequency restriction, the .1 channel can be handled at a lower sample rate, or with fewer bits in a perceptual encoding system, without an audible change. That bass speaker is likely to be LARGER than the other ones because it needs to be to reproduce those low frequencies.
Human hearing isn't very good at figuring out the location of low frequency
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An Anonymous Coward blathered:
And who cares about 5.1 speakers except the same people who buy gold monster cables for $1000?
People who have reasonably-good hearing?
After decades of watching movies and TV shows in stereo, last year, when my trusty old Sony amp finally crapped out, I bit the bullet and upgraded my home entertainment system to 7.1 surround sound. It wasn't cheap (although buying second-hand components from high-quality manufacturers let me afford it on my somewhat-restricted budget), but the results entirely justified the investment.
Shows like The Expanse became downright cinematic on
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Re:Who really cares about dolby anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's gotten to the point that I don't really care what mode my receiver is in when I'm watching something as long as it sounds decent.
Hell, in the other room I have a projector setup and the sound comes out of a single speaker off to the side. It sounds good enough.
It's a total contrast to back in the 90s and early 00s when I was obsessed with surround and having a ton of speakers and a subwoofer. I think over the years I realized that it wasn't adding that much enjoyment to my experience. What mattered most in the end is clear, crisp audio and capable bass, not how many speakers are delivering it.
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I really fucking doubt you use SACD.
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You don't speak for all of us, biatch.
Re:Who really cares about dolby anymore? (Score:5, Informative)
Since there's no -1, You're a Self-Important Ass moderation...
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An Anonymous Coward sneered:
Audio snobs are the worst neckbeards. Warhammer 40k people chuckle while competitive Magic players draw poor caricatures of audio snobs holding gold-plated cables and artisan vacuum tubes.
Nice conflation there, troll boy.
Overpriced, overhyped, gold-plated connectors and high-quality (NOT "artisan") vacuum tubes are two entirely different things.
While anyone who's actually A-B tested Monster cables knows they're crap, quality tubes (or "valves" in Brit-speak) are a whole different matter. Most of the tubes that modern manufacturers employ in audio amplifiers are made In China, and suffer from the same lack of concern for quality control and focus on quantity over q
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Monster Cable's original product actually made sense. But that was a long time ago, and the company has gone down a bunch of rabbit holes since then.
Back in the day, people mostly connected speakers with zip cord (the thin flexible wire that is used for lamps and other small electrical devices) or something similar, and it was usually 18 gauge wire so it would be small and flexible. That worked fine with tube amplifiers, which were high voltage and low current devices and usually operated with speakers desi
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An Anonymous Coward insisted:
Dude, I am an EE. Vacuum tubes are vacuum tubes. That "warmth" you guys always go on about is noise, usually 60Hz noise. You are actually saying "I like all my cars to come with cracked windows. It really makes for optimal clarity." This is exactly what the AC OP was talkin bout, Willis.
You're wrong. Let me explain why.
You are thinking like an engineer who knows nothing at all about tube applications in music. Which is to say you're thinking of tubes as signal processing components where the goal is to amplify an input signal as accurately as possible, without adding distortion or coloration in any way.
But that's not how guitar players use them. We WANT them to distort. We drive the preamp stage(s) hard, to purposefully over-amplify the signal. Some of us use f
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The thing is that unless you are in a room with no other sounds, headphones quickly become the superior experience. If someone else in the room is playing a game, or your dog is trying to get at an itch on its back, or kids are playing with Legos on the floor, or ... then the ambient noise will drown out a lot of the sound from your speakers, while the headphones by design send the sound straight into your ears.
I'd say for games like Fallout 4 or stealth-based games with proper use of the stereo channel, ha
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The game Hellblade even used binaural audio, so when you are wearing headphones you could hear sounds all around you.
It was very creepy to hear all those voices around you, and noises behind your back. Very well done!
As a side remark. The developers of Steinberg's Cubase has announced that they are working on a special binaural audio plugin (or output channel - I am not sure what it will be) that allows you to mix surround sound for headphone use. Very neat...
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Re:Who really cares about dolby anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's gotten to the point that I don't really care what mode my receiver is in
I'm not a huge fan of red velvet cake. But here's the thing, when I got onto the baking forums I don't jump into every post where they are debating the benefits of various red food colourings just to tell them about my lack of interest in red-velvet cake.
You don't like nice sound, fine. But leave the people who do and spend money on good multi-channel audio to debate the affects this change will have on them.
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An Anonymous Coward insisted:
I'm fed up with expensive and mostly shitty sounding surround sound systems. I replaced my TV speakers with studio monitors with ribbon tweeters and I couldn't be happier. I don't know of any surround sound system that can compete with the accuracy and detail of a proper studio monitors. The previous Yamaha surround speaker package I was using which costed me over 1k was so bad there's no way in hell I could hear the detail at low volume.
I agree that the vast majority of off-the-shelf 7.1 speaker systems suck donkey balls.
That's why, when I built my own system, I used bookshelf speakers from Polk Audio and Boston Acoustics for the rear and surround speakers, kept the genuine Noname tower speakers (with 15-inch woofers) I've been using since the Stoned Age as my mains, and added a Klipsch center-channel speaker and a 12" Acoustic Research powered subwoofer. They're all fed by a Yamaha RX-765 amplifier, which does
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Yup. I'll be avoiding Dolby products from now on.
I don't need a company taxing my audio with anti competitive tactics.
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I have done so log ago. This is artificial scarcity, nothing else.
It's always anti-competition. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's never about quality. It's always about hindering competition.
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That's how free markets are supposed to operate: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
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No, it's diametrically opposed to how free markets are supposed to operate.
That "regard to their own interest" is supposed to drive them to compete to produce their products at lower cost and perhaps higher quality.
Dolby seeks to reduce competition, and hence drive up prices. This is a monopoly in action and it works only because of copyright and patent laws.
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I agree, but those were created by governments supposedly for the benefit of society. You're saying you don't think they are for the benefit of society after all, and I tend to agree.
But you said:
It is only about "hindering competition" because government made it about hindering competition. Don't blame companies or markets for bad government incentives.
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I don't see it as black and white. Copyright and patent laws are required for an advanced society. However, a copyright term that is over 100 years does not benefit any society.
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Well, how utterly neutral of you.
My point remains: companies don't always make money by hindering competition instead of improving quality, they do so only if government passes laws that makes hindering competition more profitable than improving quality.
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Thank you for supporting my point that this is not in any way a free market in action.
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And by "support" you mean that you did a 180 degree turn?
"No, it's diametrically opposed to how free markets are supposed to operate."
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Since you appear to lack basic comprehension skills, welcome to my ignore list.
I have been consistent that this anti-competitive move by Adobe is NOT free market in action. You are the one that doesn't seem to be able to hold a consistent view.
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Baby, you've already been on my "idiot" list, for the simple reason that you can't express yourself clearly.
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I think it's both competition and image protection. We're talking about something as subjective as audio quality after all.
Just like Apple doesn't want their image tarnished by having their logo stamped on some half-baked $50 phones, Dolby doesn't want their logo stamped on a cheap DVD player or Receiver that is incapable of producing audio to their quality. When it comes to sound (or video) presentation, you're really only as good as your weakest link. Dolby's only real way to control their image is to ma
Control of renderer and loudness (Score:5, Informative)
Traditionally, you had a pre-mixed channel bed like 5.1 (AC-3, E-AC-3, MLP and AC-4), and 7.1 (supported by E-AC-3, MLP and AC-4). With the introduction of audio objects in 3D space, E-AC-3, MLP and AC-4 are extended - and that is what Atmos basically is.
The problem is how to manage loudness when you have a channel bed and/or objects. E-AC-3, for example, had a substream type originally reserved for future use - in this case, implementing Atmos. Since E-AC-3-based Atmos is backwards compatible with legacy E-AC-3 decoders, Dolby has had to do some tricks to the metadata to insert the objects and keep loudness managed. This can only be accomplished at the renderer, and it requires tight control of the metadata to manage loudness consistently.
When you get into third-party upmixers, they do all sorts of awful things (*cough*Neural*cough*). Two things they can do due to "artistic" interpretation are to improperly locate the audio in 3D space, and mix in the incorrect level the audio that goes into the speakers. Because of differences in perception in loudness depending on location around your head, and because you aren't mixing the right level of audio at/across a given speaker, the original renderer's interpretation of loudness metadata and location metadata is incorrect. This leads to potentially disturbing variations in loudness and confusion in location of content that is the fundamental basis for Dolby providing an entire Atmos system from authoring to rendering, end-to-end.
The only place upmixers typically exist in devices anyway is in AV receivers and soundbars. Yes, they can exist in the broadcast chain somewhere before encoding and transmission, but broadcasters should know to manage that experience any time object-based audio is in play. As for the rest, Dolby already offers its own upmixer that works with the Atmos renderer. There really is no good reason to go outside of this, and licensees of Dolby technologies are only degrading the end user experience by doing this.
Again, Dolby doesn't care per se whether someone else is using another system, be it DTS or Barco or Fraunhofer. All they care about is that the content owners and distributors don't have complaints because of this. Certain folks who provide premium content, such as HBO, are huge sticklers for audio quality and have been pioneers since the beginning. If they're investing in Atmos, they don't want the downstream experience affected and so Dolby is really doing their bidding ultimately.
So no, there's no conspiracy and Dolby isn't doing this to screw anyone else over. "Blame" the content owners if you want to blame anyone, but Dolby is just trying to provide a consistent experience that has eluded folks for decades now. If you want proof of that, go watch 100 different videos from any large free streaming site and tell me that you won't touch the volume control.
Re: Control of renderer and loudness (Score:1)
May the wind be behind Opus 1.3+, as they continue to improve ambisonics, which will eliminate this stranglehold by Dolby on manufacturers.
Re:Control of renderer and loudness (Score:5, Insightful)
So no, there's no conspiracy and Dolby isn't doing this to screw anyone else over. "Blame" the content owners if you want to blame anyone, but Dolby is just trying to provide a consistent experience that has eluded folks for decades now.
Outrage. If there isn't outrage there isn't a story in modern America. Outrage is the emotion of the day.
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If people really cared, Dolby would have no need to use legal enforcement.
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Patents are expiring so probably nothing more than loud legal screaming at being over. Although I suppose the US being a greed first country, I'll bet they'll be looking to extend patents along with copyright 'to infinity and beyond', the USA has become so lame.
LOL! Total audiophile post. (Score:1)
I literally was getting sleepy in that first paragraph listing all the dolby standards. He's like "Traditionally, you had a pre-mixed channel bed like 5.1 (A bladiblahJadajada audionuttechnobabble jaadajada" And me: "Aha, mmhmm ...*nod off* ... ZzzzZZzzzz *snor*"
It went so fast that I did notice it. :-)
Dude, I swear, *nobody* finished reading your comment. Don't take it to heart though. Why don't you tell us about your neat Burmester Amps? :-))
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Or... they're money-grabbing monopolistic bastards who have found yet another legal trick to wipe out the competition. Of course that doesn't make for nearly as good a press release...
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soo whats this about extending it to just dd 5.1?
it's just force selling their own upmixer.
most atmos installations are going to be configured like shitfuck anyways. it's a stupid idea in practice.
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What about consumers who want to compress the audio a bit and turn up the vocal track, for ease of listening in their homes or when they want to keep the volume low?
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replying to cancel accidental mis-moderation.
Content? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there even any 5.1 music available??
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There is some, but its a small niche.
http://www.avsforum.com/forum/... [avsforum.com]
https://www.hraudio.net/music.... [hraudio.net]
Re:Content? (Score:5, Informative)
Yup. Has been for almost ~20+ years.
Magic search term is DVD Audio [wikipedia.org]
For example, search Amazon for DVD Audio [amazon.com]. If you look on the left sidebar you'll see Music Format: [ ] DVD Audio.
Also check out Blu-ray Audio
Re: Content? (Score:2)
It is funny that the first link, Wikipedia, says DVD-Audio was essentially considered extinct 11 years ago. :-)
As the vast majority of music is a reproduction of a traditional performance -- that is, one where the performers are not scattered around, but in a single spot -- it isn't hard to figure out why multi-channel audio never caught on for music.
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Yes, the DVD-Audio format is extinct, which is why surround mixed music usually come out on audio-only DVD-Video. Probably because a lot of cheap DVD players weren't/aren't DVD-Audio compatible.
And I agree that surround sound music is a bit silly. If I want that sort of experience, I'll go to a concert. Other than that, just give me stereo.
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Also, there are a number of intelligent mixing options which take stereo music and do a fair job of mixing it through surround speakers.
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That's called binaural recording, and is perfectly contained in a stereo track. The drawback is that it usually doesn't sound particularly good when played back on loudspeakers.
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> Ok I don't know much about how music recording is done, ...
Should have stopped right there. :-)
You never record in stereo.
Generally, you have (N+S) microphones where N = is the number of instruments, and S is the number of singers. You record with every instrument and singer mic'd, and ideally, every tom, cymbol and piano key. While you can get away with a single mic for piano, the more mics the better.
Drums and Pianos are the special case where you "over mic" due to the numerous harmonics created due
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chill hypothesized:
As the vast majority of music is a reproduction of a traditional performance -- that is, one where the performers are not scattered around, but in a single spot -- it isn't hard to figure out why multi-channel audio never caught on for music.
You realize that's the exact same logic the British music industry used to justify sticking to monaural mixes for half a decade after American record companies had embraced stereo, don't you ... ?
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Dolby: Blinding With Science (Score:2)
When they're done blinding you with science, they want to make sure you know which direction it came from.
Fsck Dolby (Score:4, Interesting)
Dolby-A (Score:1)
Dolby-A [wikipedia.org] was the savior of studio recording decades ago. They were making too much money, so along came dbx [wikipedia.org]. Fraunhofer [wikipedia.org] likely has enough money left from its MP3 licenses to do something better really soon. Technology moves fast, but so does the competition.
Fuck it, who cares? (Score:2)
A set of high-quality stereo speakers and a sub or two to fill out the frequency range at the bottom end and done.
I don't need wizz-bang bullshit going on behind me or above me or whatever. If the move isn't immersive enough without surround sound, it's not a good movie, and hence not worth watching.
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Thank goodness I'm getting old. I used to care about media sound quality back when I could actually hear it. But after decades of rock and roll music and some live fire artillery practice, it makes no difference to me any more.
the usual (Score:2)
Companies are always trying to grab market share. But even if Dolby were to succeed at this as much as they like, they'd simply temporarily dominate the market, not monopolize it. You can bet that soon thereafter, if the feature mattered, some big company or an industry consortium would come out with some better, open source alternative.
If you own a TV or a cell phone you should care (Score:1)
At least in the US/North American markets Dolby is mandated (i.e. has a monopoly) as the broadcast standard for ATSC audio. While cable companies could do something different re-encoding feeds/content, that is a step they would want to avoid. Cell phones is are a bit different, there you only need the Dolby decoder because some of the content stands a reasonable chance of having the audio in a Dolby format. But the manufacturers are sort of forced to include it because customers expect to be able to watch a
way to go dolby (Score:2)
tainted aphorism (Score:2)
This is way more libertarian than its comic imagery suggests.
To begin with, it implies millimeter large-muscle control, situated in the cerebral cortex, over an ape-link domination reflex arc which traditionally originates in the Brown Shirt–craving amygdala.
It also implies passive boundary management on the behalf of the indolent beak. Perhaps an alternate version would read: Your right to shove your shit down my throat ends when I close m
s/link/like (Score:2)
These weirder-than-normal typos happen when I've got mental shoes pointed at the exit (you know that old "toe direction" magic decoder ring to home in on damp sex-kitten hotness).
This, in keeping with my theme, that maintenance of full autonomy does ultimately become wearing.
Eventually, another part of my brain orients me toward another task, entirely unlike girding my alimentary intake against the daily shit-sandwich shit storm.
Generally, when I'm not writing, I think the world is a grand place (mostly). T
Re:Its called a free market, snowflakes. (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean other than the government granted monopoly, right?
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Just tell them it's part of an alien invasion conspiracy.
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Wait.
There's more than one Dolby?
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I felt a lot better about it after reading your childish drivel.
Re: this is the Trumpverse (Score:2)
No, Dolby is the little "D" on ths goodcasette taps.
The musician you're thinking of is Alton Brown.
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At least he's not MY President.
Because I'm European.
Re: 8==T=R=E=A=S=O=N=C=U=C=K==D -~-_. (Score:1)
This is why I'm leaving slashdot...
Pointless political commentary in every thread.