Dolby® Digital Live is a real-time technology that converts any audio signal into Dolby Digital for easy connection to home theater systems through a single digital cable.
Converts PC or game audio signals to a Dolby Digital signal in real time
Maintains compatibility with the millions of consumer systems that support Dolby Digital
Provides an easy single-cable connection to A/V receivers, HTIB systems, and integrated 5.1-channel speaker systems
Dolby Digital is an advanced audio coding technology that efficiently delivers up to 5.1 discrete channels of surround sound. Dolby Digital is widely used throughout the world for cinema, home theater, and broadcasting. Most home theater A/V receivers incorporate Dolby Digital technology.
Dolby Digital Live is an implementation of Dolby Digital encoding that enables a PC to serve as a source component for a home theater system. Dolby Digital Live converts any PC audio signal—from a CD, a DVD, streamed content, and games—to a Dolby Digital signal.
Dolby Digital Live encodes the signal into a compact Dolby Digital bitstream in real time.
The signal is sent from the PC to the home theater system via a single digital cable (S/PDIF), eliminating the confusion and hassle of multiple cables. The connection also ensures the quality of the audio signal.
Why Dolby
As PCs become multimedia hubs, consumers increasingly rely on them for entertainment. However, native PC audio does not reach the levels of quality that can be attained by a full home theater system.
Dolby Digital Live provides a practical, cost-effective solution for delivering discrete multichannel audio from a PC to a home theater system.
Dolby Digital Live adds to the versatility and functionality of a PC as a multimedia source component.
Dolby Digital Live ensures playback compatibility with nearly all multichannel playback systems, from elaborate home theaters to compact, integrated 5.1-channel speaker systems.
From a hardware standpoint, the single S/PDIF digital connection is easier and less expensive to implement than multiple analog connectors.
Dolby Digital Live is part of Dolby Home Theater v3. It is also available for license as an individual technology.
Dolby Digital audio coding works by dividing the audio spectrum of each channel into narrow frequency bands optimized with respect to the frequency selectivity of human hearing. This makes it possible to force coding noise to stay very close in frequency to, and therefore be masked by, the frequency components of the audio signal.
The Dolby Digital algorithm also decides how the available bits are distributed among the various channels from a common bit pool. This allows channels with greater frequency content to demand more data than sparsely occupied channels, for example, or strong sounds in one channel to provide masking for noise in other channels.
Dolby Digital coding can process at least 20-bit dynamic range digital audio signals over a frequency range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz. (The LFE channel covers 20 to 120 Hz.) Sampling rates of 32, 44.1, and 48 kHz are supported. Data rates for 5.1 channels include the 448 kbps standard for DVD-Video.