Dolby Looking To Monopolize Consumer Audio By Restricting Its Codec (audioholics.com)

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.

Comments

Re: My give a damn can't be upmixed

[mSparks43]

dolby is the reason you still cant use your 5.1 speakers properly. hopefully this kills them.

Control of renderer and loudness

[StandardCell]

Atmos is a system, not a codec.

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:Who really cares about dolby anymore?

[I'm New Around Here]

You don't speak for all of us, biatch.

Re:Who really cares about dolby anymore?

[Zontar The Mindless]

Since there's no -1, You're a Self-Important Ass moderation...

Re:Content?

[UnknownSoldier]

Yup. Has been for almost ~20+ years.

Magic search term is DVD Audio

For example, search Amazon for DVD Audio. If you look on the left sidebar you'll see Music Format: [ ] DVD Audio.

Also check out Blu-ray Audio

Smartphone vs home theater

[DrYak]

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.