Focus on Audistry
Dolby Podcast Episode 28, January 3, 2008
Mahesh Sundaram from Dolby Laboratories talks about Audistry by Dolby, a suite of digital audio post-processing features that allows listeners to customize the listening experience to their own taste. Listener, Ron from Clifton Park, New York, asks Craig and Jack about connecting his Polk Audio RM10 speakers to his AV receiver.
Jack Buser: Hello and welcome to Dolbycast, the insiders' guide to entertainment technology from the experts at Dolby Laboratories. I'm Jack Buser.
Craig Eggers: And I'm Craig Eggers.
Jack: We are here to give you the straight talk on everything you need to please your ears.
Craig: Welcome back, listeners, to Dolbycast. Jack, I want to be the first to wish you a very Happy New Year.
Jack: Happy New Year, that's right.
Craig: And a prosperous New Year because...
Jack: Absolutely.
Craig:...each of us has invested in video during the season.
Jack: Yes, that is true.
Craig: You have a new front projector?
Jack: Yes, that is true. For this holiday season, I actually gave myself quite a nice little Christmas present and it's a 1080p front projector. It is projecting on a 106" screen. It's the Panasonic AE-PT2000U or the PT-AE2000U as it were. That thing is beautiful.
Craig: I'm so glad, I'm so glad to hear about this because, listeners, you know Jack, for the past 8 months has been coming to my room, my office and saying, "What should I get? What should I get?" Every week, it was a new product. Right?
Jack: That's right. Well, actually to be specific, every week it was a new 1080p projector.
Craig: There you go. So anyway, congratulations, Jack.
Jack: Now, Craig, what did you get? I heard you also had a little video holiday yourself?
Craig: I moved my rear projection CRT into the bedroom.
Jack: Yes.
Craig: And I now have a 65”-wide DLP that I put in the main theater.
Jack: Wow! 1080p?
Craig: 1080p.
Jack: Oh, yes! Listen, we're both in the world of 1080p. This is wonderful!
Craig: So we have some upcoming podcasts we should actually talk about, because we've got some interesting things coming. Right?
Jack: There's some great stuff coming up. Yes, that's right.
Craig: We will be at CES as part of our exhibit and I know that traditionally every year now we do a post-CES wrap up of some of the new technologies.
Jack: We do. And listeners, if any of you listeners come to CES, be sure to ask for Jack or Craig at the Dolby booth and we'll be having [indecipherable] and meet you and answer any of your questions right there live in the booth. How about that?
Craig: There you go, and we got the best of Dolbycast for those of you who would tend the booth [indecipherable].
Jack: Absolutely.
Craig: We'll even sign it, if you want. I don't think we're that famous, Jack.
Jack: I don't think so either.
Craig: I don't think so.
Jack: Listen, speaking of fame, I got to thank the guys from NoobToob.com. They were kind enough to post on Digg.com our last episode with Marty from Bungie and the thing got quite a number of diggs and we got a lot of traffic to the site, so thank you NoobToob.com. That's really nice of you to post that for us.
Craig: I have to say that our [interview] with Marty was one of the best.
Jack: That was a lot of fun.
Craig: It was a lot of fun...
Jack: Marty is such a great guy.
Craig:...and lot of good information, too.
Jack: Absolutely. But today, we're going to be talking about something wonderful. I'm actually quite excited. We've been talking about doing this podcast for a long time.
Craig: For quite some time.
Jack: And what is it about?
Craig: It's about a product called Audistry.
Jack: That's right. We have a very special guest, Mahesh Sundaram, is here joining us on Dolbycast.
Craig: I like the way you rolled your eyes there.
Jack: I practiced actually for the show.
Craig: Yes, OK, OK.
Jack: I did, I practiced for the show. And we're going to be talking about Audistry today and the next podcast, we're going to be doing...
Craig: Listener questions.
Jack:...Listener questions.
Craig: And then after that, we've got some exciting things for people who are interested in home theater environments.
Jack: Yes.
Craig: Maximizing your home theater environment...
Jack: That's right.
Craig:...as well as home theater automations. We'll be talking about that.
Jack: That's right. We got some great stuff, and let's not forget the CES wrap up.
Craig: Exactly.
Jack: Do come and say, "Hi!" to us at CES if you're there. We're going to go to a break. When we come back...
Craig: If you're not at the CES, we'll cover it for you.
Jack: You got it.
Craig: How's that?
Jack: When we come back, we'll going to be talking everything you ever wanted to know about Audistry with Mahesh.
Craig: But first...
Jack: Yes?
Craig:...that listener question.
Jack: Listener question. Oh, that's right.
Craig: So, back right after the break.
Jack: Back right after the break.
[radio break]
Jack: And we're back to Dolbycast. Listen, after the break, we decided to do the listener question this time if you're wondering why we didn't do the listener question before the break. The reason why is because we wanted to give you an overview of all the cool upcoming episodes.
Craig: There you go.
Jack: Without further ado, let's jump right into that question.
Craig: It sounds like a good explanation.
Jack: I made it up on the fly. What the heck.
Craig: There you go.
Jack: This question comes from a listener, and if I could actually get the paper, come from Ron from Clifton Park, New York . He says, "Jack and Craig, I've been listening to you, guys, from the beginning (thank you very much, Ron) and I have a great question." I happen to agree, Ron, this is a great question.
Craig: Yes.
Jack: So several years ago, he bought an entry level 5.1 speaker system and loves them, Polk Audio RM10, for those listeners that are wondering. In the way he's got it set up is that the speakers he connects the left and right and the front and rear speaker connections to his subwoofer, which is actually a little bit different, because most people have their speakers directly hooked up to their AV receiver. But he's actually hooked up his speakers to the subwoofer, so the actual speakers are connected to the subwoofer. He then connected the amp to "no sub" and large speakers, so that sends all the low frequencies out to the left and right channels.
Now, the listeners out there can picture the set up, it's essentially going from the AV receiver to the subwoofer and then from the subwoofer to the speakers, so definitely a little bit of a different set up. He says, "I understand the LFE channel has its own separately encoded channel in the Dolby soundtrack. But in this case, the crossover in the subwoofer is determining which low frequencies to play, which works, but am I missing better sound because it's not the actual LFE channel playing on the sub?"
So, Craig, you read this before, it's a little complicated but I think we have an answer for you.
Craig: I hope we have an answer because it's my understanding that a system like this, this is essentially a satellite subsystem, you have small speakers and a subwoofer. The function of a satellite subsystem is to basically take the frequencies that cannot go to the main speakers, because they're too low and route those directly to the subwoofer.
So the subwoofer is essentially reproducing your low frequencies from your main speakers—left, center, right, left surround, right surround—in addition to that LFE information as part of the Dolby soundtrack. That's essentially what happens when you set up your home theater system and tell your home theater system that you have small speakers.
Jack: That's right. Now, listeners, if you've been listening to our podcast for a long time, you're probably familiar with bass management and that setting on your receiver where you set your speakers to large or small, sub off or on.
Craig: Exactly.
Jack: Generally, all the handling of all the different frequencies and all the routing is handled by your AV receiver. Ron, in your particular set up, the instructions have told you to configure your amp to no sub and large speakers, and then let your sub do the filtering and rerouting. And guess what, when you set that receiver to no sub, it's actually rerouting the LFE to the main left and right channels. So if you're afraid that you've lost the LFE, you've actually not. The LFE is being routed to that sub along with the main signal.
Craig: I think there's a crossover in that sub.
Jack: There's a crossover, exactly right.
Craig: So what's happened is the crossover in the sub is to determine a certain frequency.
Jack: Exactly right.
Craig: Above which goes to the mains and below which everything goes to the sub.
Jack: Exactly right and he should not be losing anything.
Craig: No, he's not.
Jack: He's got set it up perfect. So, Ron, it sounds like you have everything set up perfectly right. Thank you for stretching our mental capability with that one. That was a tough question.
Craig: It was.
Jack: For all our other listeners, we are going to be doing a listener question episode, so we'll see if you guys can break our understanding of home theater. It's going to be tough. But...
Craig: It's going to be tough. I hear we have a lot of questions, too.
Jack: I hear we do. I hear we do. But without further ado, Craig, would you like to introduce our guest here?
Craig: I'm very proud to introduce this guest, because he's actually my boss.
[laughter]
Craig: And my review's tomorrow.
Jack: Yeah. Oh. Hey, all right. Well, don't ask—you better throw a bunch of softballs here.
Craig: Yeah. Really. So I met Mahesh Sundaram when he worked for a Dolby subsidiary, Lake Technologies, when we had just acquired Lake . Mahesh worked in Dolby Australia . It's now called Dolby Australia . He is director of marketing here at Dolby Laboratories. We invited Mahesh onto our podcast, because he's been a major driving force in the development and marketing—initial marketing efforts—of a technology—of a suite of technologies from Dolby called " Audistry." Welcome, my boss, Mahesh.
Mahesh Sundaram: Jack and Craig, thanks very much for having me here.
Jack: Absolutely. It's a pleasure to have you here.
Craig: He's got a lower voice than us. Did you notice that?
Jack: Absolutely. Especially, since we both have colds and you're still well.
Craig: Yeah.
Mahesh: I have to tell you that I am a big fan of your podcast. I do listen to Dolbycast. In addition to that, I do meet a lot of Dolby's customers who listen to your podcast and are huge fans. So you have a very big fan following in the industry, whether you know it or not.
Jack: Well, thank you, Mahesh. That's very kind of you to say.
Craig: An endorsement. Got to love it.
Jack: An endorsement. I love it. I love it.
Craig: So Mahesh, here's the softball question: what is Audistry?
Mahesh: Put it simply, it's a product. It's a new product from Dolby. It's a suite of technologies that's packaged together to work together, and offered to our customers. What it does is it essentially—the suite is a suite of digital audio post-processing features. We are familiar with audio pre-processing. This is an offering from Dolby that offers post-processing. It helps listeners customize their listening experience to suit their own taste.
Jack: So that's a very cool concept. I remember the first time you guys explained to me the Audistry concept, the idea that a listener could customize the listening experience to their own taste. Do you feel like that's something a lot of people want and demand? I mean I know that's something I certainly would want, if I could go in there and really tweak the sound. So tell me a little bit about that.
Mahesh: I think at a fundamental level, everybody wants to have their own listening experience. As we get into an environment of personalized listening and personalized devices, people do want a customized listening experience. I think there's a huge market out there that demands this kind of capability that elevates the listening experience from where it is today.
Jack: Absolutely.
Craig: So this is a little bit—I mean whole Audistry thing is kind of different for Dolby, because we've always focused so much on delivering what the producer, what the director, what the artist wanted you to hear as accurately as possible.
Jack: Yeah. Untouched, right?
Craig: Untouched.
Jack: So this is definitely a little bit different.
Mahesh: This is different. It's different for exactly those things you mention. Dolby's always delivered the content as the artist intended. Audistry is about taking the listening experience to the user, and allowing the user to customize that listening experience.
Jack: That's very cool.
Craig: So Mahesh, can you tell us some of the different feature offerings that are part of this Audistry package?
Mahesh: Sure. The package has five features. Natural Bass, which is our bass enhancement feature, so it helps you to get better bass out of the products that you're listening to. Sound Space Expander is the second feature. There are two flavors of it. One is for devices that use speakers and one is for devices that use headphones.
Essentially, Sound Space helps you to expand the sound stage in any environment. So if it means taking the listening experience out of your head and placing it as though the speaker's in front of you using headphones, then you would the headphone flavor. If you were to use it a home theater kind of system, which is stereo home theater, and expand that sound stage to give you like an enveloping experience, you would use the speaker flavor of the feature.
Craig: Mahesh, I noticed with Sound Space Expander that not only do you have a wider sound stage, but also individual instruments within the mix are easily distinguished and much easier than just the conventional stereo experience.
Mahesh: Sure. We've made a lot of effort to make sure that there are certain aspects of the mix that we do not touch. So for example, there's nothing that's done to the dialog, because in a proper mix, the dialog has to come from the center. So we make sure that we don't do things that are unnatural to the listening experience, while creating separation of instruments and expanding the sound stage. So that's kind of the way the feature is designed.
Craig: Mm-hmm.
Mahesh: Make sure that the experience is still natural, while creating the separation and expanding the sound stage.
Jack: I mean I would imagine that this is really important if you have a system where the speakers are really close together, right? So, for instance, in my bedroom I'm watching TV, maybe through my TV speakers, or I have a little mini-system or something like that, where the speakers can't be very far apart. In my experience with Audistry, it's been absolutely fabulous at making the system sound...
Craig: Much wider.
Jack:...much wider than it actually is.
Mahesh: And that's the target market. If you think about the television environment, where the televisions are getting bigger and bigger in size, but then they're also getting thinner and thinner. The space available for speakers is less, so the kinds of speakers that are used today are of a certain capability. They can only do so much.
At the same time, there's a desire for the consumer to get a good audio experience. It's really hard for the manufacturers to deliver on that without any further signal processing capabilities.
Jack: Well, the speakers are so thin. I mean the tiny little speakers on the side of a flat panel today really struggle a lot of time with just standard soundtracks from your favorite shows.
Mahesh: Right. And they're also placed close together.
Jack: Right.
Mahesh: Another market is the stereo systems, which is a very, very large market. The mini-stereos are...
Craig: Docking system.
Mahesh:...if you think about it. Docking stations, the iPod accessories, the portable media player accessories—the iPod being, of course, one of them—there's a huge market out there that already exists, and it's only being expanded further and further. So these are all environments where the speakers are placed close together and there's still a desire for very, very good sound capability out of those products.
Craig: You know one of the areas of Audistry that most impressed me initially—besides Sound Space—if we may go back for just a second, is this Natural Bass thing.
Mahesh: Mm-hmm.
Craig: It's more than just bringing more bass sound. I mean you literally deliver a bass experience that is optimized to the performance of the system. A lot of times when you enhance the bass in a small speaker system, you end up creating distortion.
Mahesh: Right.
Craig: You don't want that.
Mahesh: Right.
Craig: But somehow Audistry enables us to really make the signal much warmer, much deeper...
Jack: Much more full. Yeah. Absolutely.
Craig: How does that happen?
Mahesh: It's designed to make the listening experience very rich [while] at the same time, not causing any kind of unnatural distortion or any of this unpleasantness that comes along with some of the audio enhancement capabilities. So it's a really cool thing. It extracts the best performance out of the device that you have and does it at a very, very optimal level. That speaks to the design of the features.
Jack: Absolutely. Now you mentioned the Natural Bass, the Sound Space Expander, are there any other features in the Audistry suite we should know about?
Mahesh: There are two more. One is what we call Sound Level Controller. It's essentially a dynamic range compression feature. It makes the soft sounds louder and the loud sounds softer, so that when you're listening to music or watching movies late in the night, it gives you an experience by not waking up your neighbors.
It also has a feature called Mono-to-Stereo [Creator]. There's a lot of content out there that's in mono, and if you would like to get a good sound stage experience, the first thing you do is to first convert it to stereo, and then use the other features of Audistry to make the listening experience better.
Jack: Very cool.
Craig: So, when we come back Mahesh, I want to ask you the question that probably our listeners are thinking, which is, "OK, so it's a sound enhancement suite of technologies from Dolby. How is it different from other product offerings, other technologies that are out there that might be similar to it?" So, we're going to take a real quick break, and we'll be right back.
[music]
Braden Russell: Hi, I'm Braden Russell.
Ara Derderian: And I'm Ara Derderian, and together we're the HT Guys.
Braden: You're listening to Dolbycast and if you've got a question about audio, where do you send it?
Ara: To dolbycast@dolby.com.
[music]
Craig: Back at Dolbycast with Mr. Mahesh Sundaram, Director of CE [Consumer Electronics – ed.] Marketing for Dolby Laboratories, and my patriot, Mr. Jack Buser.
Jack: Hello Craig, how are you?
Craig: I'm very good, how are you doing?
Jack: I'm doing all right.
Craig: You still OK?
Jack: I'm still OK, even with this cold.
Craig: Really. Both of us.
So Mahesh, as we exited the last segment, my question to you was, OK I'm a consumer, there's lots of sound enhancement technologies that I can choose from in the marketplace, why as a consumer or even more importantly maybe, why as a licensee of Dolby Laboratories, would I be interested in adopting Audistry in my products?
Mahesh: It goes back to the design of the technology and when we actually first came up with it. What are the problems we are really trying to solve? So, if you think about the audio enhancement technologies that are out there, the problem is that today you have technologies that you take from various places and put them all together and try to make them work.
That is really challenging, because if you take an EQ from a college textbook, and a bass enhancement feature that you design and try to mash it all together, it doesn't really work quite well. It sounds pretty ghastly when you do one thing with one feature and another thing with another feature.
Jack: Well, you end up just turning those things off, right?
Mahesh: So, that's one of the observations we made. The other observations we made as a consequence of this were the consumer experiences. You turn on the feature, and then it sounds so ghastly that you turn it off. So, the challenge is, how can we help the consumer have a great listening experience and keep it on? That was the fundamental problem that we were trying to solve, and we factored that into the design.
So, what's different about it is the techniques that we used. So, as we all know, Dolby has a tremendous amount of research that we've done over the last several years in the psychoacoustic field. We have experts in this domain who are the best in the world, who do this. In the design, all of their expertise was brought to bear in the development of this product. The benefit is that these features are designed from the ground up, they work extremely well together, and they make the overall listening experience really, really powerful.
Jack: I have to agree with that, because I am a user of a product with Audistry. I'm not even sure if it's still on the market, but it's the Sharp SD-SP10 [speaker/subwoofer combo]. It's actually a sound bar that was designed for flat panel TVs. It sits underneath your TV. I pretty much flipped on every single feature on Audistry and have just left it like that, because you turn off the features, and essentially it sounds much thinner and much less enveloping than when you turn on the features. Suddenly you get this very enveloping, almost surround sound experience. You get the big warm bass that fills the room. It's wonderful.
Mahesh: Actually, there's a range of products from Sharp that incorporate Audistry technology. The product you are specifically referring to and the category of products that you are referring to is the 2 channels, 3 channel home theater systems that are becoming very, very popular in specific markets around the world. They are extremely affordable, and they bring home theater to a whole new set of users. With Audistry, they get a fantastic listening experience out of a very, very affordable product.
Jack: And tiny, I mean it's very small, you would barely even know the thing's there. People sit down in front of the TV and wow.
Craig: The form factor of the Sharp product that you have, literally you could put it underneath your television set.
Jack: Absolutely. So, are there any other products out there that you'd like to highlight that support Audistry that you think our listeners might be interested in?
Mahesh: Well, the SD-SP10 and the SD-SP100 that you mentioned, they were the sound bar kind of products, that were like amplifier products that would go along with home theater, they are like a 2-channel home theater. Sharp has also designed some fantastic home theater furniture products that incorporate this technology.
So, think about having a 45-inch display, and you want to have great sound out of the product, you can actually buy this bench on which you can keep the TV, but the audio system is actually designed into the bench.
Jack: That's wonderful.
Mahesh: That's really convenient and it's fantastic.
Jack: And it supports Audistry?
Mahesh: Absolutely.
Jack: So, furniture with Dolby technology, who would have...?
Craig: You think about it though, that makes a lot of sense, because a lot of people who are buying plasma or flat panel displays are not putting them on the wall. You're going out and buying custom furniture, and if that custom furniture offers you a much better audio experience, has the form factor that—you don't have to go out and purchase a 5.1 system, maybe you don't want to support that.
Jack: That's a good point.
Craig: It's a wonderful place to just start integrating these types of audio technologies.
Jack: What is the model number on that again? Do you remember the model?
Craig: Look out listeners, Jack is ready to buy again.
Mahesh: It's the AN-45, and you want to probably look for that, and then it will lead you to 3 or 4 other products.
Jack: Are you kidding? Oh, that's wonderful.
Craig: You know what? We need to go to CES, and hit the Sharp booth, and get all that information for our listeners. That's got to be a great idea, huh?
Jack: Absolutely.
Mahesh: There are lots of other applications, too. For consumers, of course, it makes the listening experience better. For manufacturers, they're able to add value. So, all in all, this is a great offering. And of course, it's a new product. It's a new brand. That always creates excitement in the market. There are other products that we are working with manufacturers on, like portable media players, televisions, more 2-channel home theater systems. So, there's a big market out there.
Jack: Portables would be cool, yeah.
Mahesh: Portables would be cool too, yeah. So, if you think about a portable media player where you have the Audistry features, it will really make your listening experience so much better than what it is today.
Jack: Mahesh, this is wonderful. I can't thank you enough for coming in today and talking to us about Audistry.
Craig: You did a great job.
Jack: Absolutely, it was wonderful. Just in time for [your] review. Listen, it really has been a pleasure to have you on the show, this has just been amazing. Audistry, I am ready to buy some furniture with some sound systems built in.
Mahesh: There you go.
Craig: So listeners, stay tuned, because we have got our CES wrap-up coming up in a future podcast. We have got questions and answers, which we have been delinquent in responding to, and some really exciting future podcasts.
Jack: Very cool, Mahesh, thanks again.
Mahesh: Thanks very much.
Jack: Thanks a lot.
Craig: Thanks Jack.
Jack: all right, thanks Craig.
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