How Android tablets could set the standard for mobile audio, media experience - Network World

I recently had the opportunity to experiment with Dolby’s new mobile sound technology, branded Dolby Digital Plus, or "DDP." The preview of DDP that ran on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10 with ICS Android 4.0 was impressive. Dolby’s demonstration was cleverly engineered with a dozen media samples, including computer-generated video, movies, and music that used a simple ON/OFF widget so that the effect of DDP on the media samples could be compared.

Dolby noticeably enhanced the audio of most of the samples. Small, side-mounted tablet speakers often don’t raise one’s expectations of a memorable audio experience. Dolby Digital Plus, in this comparative demonstration, raised the bar in terms of the user’s expectations for a tablet audio experience.

With more than four decades of experience, Dolby leads with both the science and art of audio capture and recreation.

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The general design of Dolby technology appears to be asymmetric. The capture, processing and encoding of audio at the studio is engineered by Dolby to lighten the processing overhead on processor-limited audio playback devices, such as tablets. This makes the dynamic recreation of clear and authentic-sounding audio possible without over taxing the tablet’s limited resources or increasing the OEM’s bill of material costs. Although DDP improves any audio, it seemed to dramatically improve audio encoded with Dolby 5.1 technology.

DDP is engineered to read ahead to analyze the audio stream. In doing this, DDP optimizes its choice of head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) that simulate - through the embedded speakers or an external sound system - the arrival of sound at the ears to create a surround-sound experience. These idealized HRTFs are chosen to best represent a given audio type, such as dialogue, music, or user-captured video. Android OEM’s and after-market audio playback component manufactures can fine tune HRTFs with configuration files that optimize the performance of the manufacturer’s choice of internal speakers or the after-market manufacturers’ designs of external HDMI sound systems.

While the science of each of the components depicted in the chart above are worth further discussion, more interesting is the art represented in the recreation of the audio. Dolby understands human hearing and how people perceive the audio characteristics of various media sources. This is best demonstrated when listening to an audio sample that appears to be amplified by DDP. DDP dynamically selects certain frequencies for amplification, filtering and limiting them in order to manipulate the listener’s perception and improve the audio experience. The algorithms use psychoacoustic and cognitive models of audio perception that are the art in Dolby’s technology.

Jelly Bean, the latest version of Android, supports multichannel audio. App developers and mobile device OEM’s will be able to add DDP to either enhance the two-speaker tablet audio experience by down-mixing Dolby multichannel audio, or deliver full multichannel Dolby 5.1 audio to an external sound system via an HDMI interface.

Whereas the iPod enhanced the music experience, the tablet could enhance the overall mobile media experience. Tablet mobility is new and different because the large display frees the user from the isolation of the small screen and ear buds of smartphones. Because tablets are more conducive to a shared experience by two or three people, the same media is more likely to be consumed, sometimes on embedded speakers and at other times on an external sound system, depending on the situation. Many LCDs already support DDP and have an HDMI interface, which is likely to create a Bring Your Own Media (BYOM) model as people plug in their tablets to larger screens and better sound systems and consume media from a variety of new sources.

Android is a great platform for Dolby Digital Plus, given its mobile and embedded attributes. Android could be the vehicle that Dolby exploits to extend its vertical reach in broadcast, studio, content creation and consumer into mobile media, primarily because Apple doesn’t license Dolby technologies and Microsoft’s mobile adoption has been limited thus far.