| Cinema TechnologiesDolby technologies put you in the center of the movie experience.
 | Dolby Digital introduced 5.1-channel digital sound in 1992. The numbering refers to five full-range channels, plus a subwoofer channel (the .1) that covers the lowest one-tenth of the audible range. With digital sound each of the channels is completely discrete, so the audience hears exactly the same soundtrack as the director heard in the studio.
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35 mm Dolby Digital Print
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The SR analog track allows prints to play conventionally in any cinema not equipped for Dolby Digital.
Dolby Digital Playback
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Dolby Digital provides extraordinary dynamic capability, wide frequency range, low distortion, and relative immunity to wear. The full-range surround channels make lifelike special effects possible, and the subwoofer sound can often be felt as well as heard.
Its combination of high quality, reliability, and practicality has been proved in cinemas around the world, and today it is the most popular digital format, with the most cinemas equipped worldwide and the most releases.
Dolby Digital Surround EX |
 | Introduced in 1999, the technology adds a third surround channel to the Dolby Digital format. Enabling improved realism, more precise sound placement, and exciting special effects, the new channel is reproduced by rear-wall surround speakers, while the left and right surround channels are reproduced by speakers on the side walls. |
Dolby Digital Surround EX Playback
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As with all Dolby soundtrack improvements, Dolby Digital Surround EX is backward-compatible, with prints playable in all Dolby Digital cinemas, whether or not they are equipped to decode the additional surround track.
Dolby Stereo technology provided such a highly practical 35 mm stereo optical release print format that by the late 1980s almost all major titles were being released with wide-range multichannel stereo soundtracks. In the space allotted to the conventional mono optical soundtrack are two soundtracks that not only carry left and right information for stereo sound, but are also encoded with a third center-screen channel and most notably a fourth surround channel for ambient sound and special effects.
Dolby SR is an advanced recording process applied to Dolby Stereo soundtracks, greatly improving their dynamic range (the ratio of the loudest sounds to the softest). Introduced in 1986, Dolby SR (spectral recording) provided more than twice the noise reduction of Dolby A-type, and, moreover, permitted loud sounds with wider frequency response and lower distortion. The 35 mm optical soundtracks treated with Dolby SR not only sounded superb in cinemas equipped with new Dolby SR processors, but also played back satisfactorily in all cinemas. As a result, today, the analog soundtracks on virtually all prints are Dolby SR tracks.
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