HDD Demos Dolby Atmos and Dolby TrueHD Advanced 96K Upsampling

[gadgtfreek]

HDD Demos Dolby Atmos and Dolby TrueHD Advanced 96K Upsampling | High-Def Digest

What's important to remember here is that most (if not all) television and theatrical motion picture audio is recorded at 48 kHz. Because multi-track soundtracks are so complicated, and because source materials are recorded in many places, upgrading the mixing process to 96K would take a lot more gear and storage. But what if the professional sound designers could keep their current workflow, but still produce a better product?

Because TrueHD can natively handle 96K, Dolby thought if they could upsample finished audio from 48K to 96K, there would be a noticeable fidelity upgrade. But, again, what's the best way to make this happen? Sure, some AV Receivers have DACs (digital to analog converters) capable of such upsampling, but in a 7.1 mix, it requires a lot of horsepower. Also, up-resolution algorithms introduce their own flaws, which can only be fixed with expensive "apodizing" filters. How expensive? Consider Meridian Audio's 808.2 Signature Reference CD Player. It does everything we're talking about here…for $16,000.

Dolby realized that the only way for them to increase the fidelity of soundtracks and reduce digital artifacts while not making it more expensive for movie studios or consumers is after the mix, but before the TrueHD encoding process. So Dolby licensed Meridian's apodizing filter technology and cooked it into the latest version of their professional encoding software. This means we're about get all the benefit of 96K recordings from 48K source material without having to change anything in our systems (assuming your AVR is capable of doing 96K digital to analog conversions).

 

[John Kotches]

It's interesting that they purchased this particular technology.

Apodizing is interesting in that it improves front end impulse response for backend ring time. The catch is that psychoacoustically, the backend ring occurs in a window that we don't perceive.

This is some interesting stuff and I wouldn't be surprised if former Meridian Director of Research and current Dolby Labs employee Rhonda Wilson had involvement in it.

She's very talented and one of the top DSP engineers in the world.

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