Dolby Home Theater v4 & Dolby Advanced Audio v2
Ok, so music and music videos aren’t really your thing, you’re more of the on the go movie type. Here’s some good news, Dolby has new products for you guys too! Dolby Home Theater v4 and Advanced Audio v2 are by far the best mobile solutions that were demoed. Both were shown on an Acer Aspire 5750 which is specifically built for these new Dolby technologies. Now, to make a complicated setup simple, Home Theater v4 and Advanced Audio v2 pretty much go hand-in-hand. Home Theater v4’s focus is to deliver immersive surround sound and high fidelity audio for all forms of entertainment content. And, Advanced Audio v2’s focus is to provide a consistent listening experience and virtual surround sound on the built-in laptop speakers or headphones. Ok, maybe it’s still complicated, so let’s dig a little deeper.
Home Theater v4 offers factory presets, a graphic equalizer, adjustable dialogue enhancer, custom settings for surround virtualization, and a volume leveler. Once you have these set where you’d like, you can save them in an empty preset slot for easy accessibility later.
Advanced Audio v2 has a few features that might ‘wow’ you a bit more, particularly the Intelligent Equalizer. Usually I’ll play around with an equalizer for a while and I’ll get a particular sound I like. However, there’ll always be that one song that doesn’t need to be equalized. When that song starts to play, I’ll freak out because it will sound horrible. So I usually disable the equalizer and never turn it back on again. I’ve come to accept this equalizer battle as a way of life, but Dolby didn’t want to give up as easy. They’ve created the Intelligent Equalizer that’ll analyze the audio being played, regardless of what it is, and if it already matches your equalized profile, it won’t touch the audio. Although, if there’s a track that needs a boost in the lows but not in the mid, then it will do that. Likewise, if the track needs everything equalized, it will do that too. I’d definitely like to get some one-on-one time with the Intelligent Equalizer to see if it can live up to the hype. Some other features you’ll find with Advanced Audio v2 are multiple regulators and optimizers. They will eliminate or reduce distortion on overdriven speakers (common on laptops), level out volumes across all media so something aren’t super loud and others aren’t super quit, or maximize the volume while preventing clipping. All in all, Dolby has some cool tech coming out in the mobile space, and if you love any type of audio, you should see firsthand what they have to offer.
The Real Home Theater
The Dolby Definition Lounge wouldn’t be complete without a true home theater setup. As you chill out on a huge couch, you’re bombarded with glorious HD content in 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound. VUDU and Netflix were demoed, along with some YouTube videos with basic 2 channel sound that have been converted into 5.1 surround. VUDU and Netflix offer streaming content natively encoded with Dolby Digital Plus which allows up to 7.1 channels. As you could imagine, the sound was amazing (I’m sure the B&W MT-30 speaker system helped too).
It’s said that all good things must come to an end. Even so, it was difficult to leave the Dolby Definition Lounge. Therefore, I’m hoping Dolby does it again next year!
