Dolby TrueHD Ready for Primetime By Wes Phillips July 28, 2007 — Recently we received an SOS from fearless leader John Atkinson. Dolby is staging a press event on an evening I have a schedule conflict, he wrote. Could you attend in my stead? As obligations go, attending an industry dinner is not exactly the most onerous task going—alcohol is frequently served (the best way to guarantee the press shows up) and you get to hang out with your fellow A/V journalists, an admittedly mixed blessing. What is not assured is that there will actually be news.

Nevertheless, I donned the tropic casual attire required for a mid-July trek across Manhattan and showed up on time to be wined and dined. As these events go, it was first-class and I enjoyed myself tremendously. Then we retired to another suite, housing a modest A/V system (two Snell C7 speakers ($3000/each), two Snell SR-30THX surround speakers ($2000/pair), one Snell CR70 center channel speaker ($$1750), one Snell B300 subwoofer ($1500/each), Toshiba HD-XA2 HD player ($599), Onkyo TX-SR605 receiver ($899)) and my smug assumptions about the evening disappeared. After the obligatory clip from King Kong, Craig Eggers, Dolby Laboratories' senior manager, of consumer electronics partner marketing began playing music—and it sounded fabulous!

It was about the time I realized that the Martin guitars played by Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds on Live at Radio City sounded mighty like, well Martin guitars, that I stopped the show. "What are you playing?" I demanded. "This is some of the best multichannel sound I've ever heard."

"It's called Dolby TrueHD and it's available on high definition DVD, both HD DVD and Blu-ray," Eggers said. "It's the most efficient lossless compression system developed to date. For eight channels, you can encode up to 24-bits/96kHz, but for fewer channels, it can deliver up to 192kHz. It's built on Meridian's MLP Lossless technology, which means it can provide 5.1 and 2.0 downmixes of 7.1 recordings. What we're hearing right now is 24-bit 192kHz PCM delivered over HDMI to the receiver."

Wow. "Why aren't I more aware of this?"

"That's a very good question, since it's your job to know this, and, for the last year it has been my job to make people like you aware of it. Let's just say that the tipping point has now been achieved. Every Sony Blu-ray player has TrueHD via upgrade or current introduction, ditto Pioneer, and Panasonic offers the DMP BD10, and that little thing called the PS3 is Dolby TrueHD capable—and you're going to see a ton of players and processors at CEDIA in September. We are very gratified with the adoption rate.

"On the HD DVD side, every Toshiba player that has ever been introduced has Dolby TrueHD built into it, and there are about 30 titles available now."

"Well, Craig, a lot of audiophiles sat out the SACD/DVD-A format war because they wanted see what was going to survive—and they were tired of buying and re-buying the same discs over and over."

"I don't think you'll see that here. For one thing, in a real sense, Dolby is the standard. For another thing, I can't imagine anybody going back and remastering audio-only material for HD and Blu-ray. TrueHD is a definite added benefit for those two formats—one that discerning listeners will appreciate. Some fans might buy Live at Radio City to see Dave Matthews, but I was tempted because the guitars sounded so darn real on 'Superman Returns.' In fact, I liked the sound of those amplified guitars so much, I went out and bought myself a Martin just like theirs."

Hmmm, this guy's serious about sound.

"Wes, I can understand why you—and other audiophiles—might not have been aware of TrueHD, but this aimed right at serious listeners. The audio quality is the big benefit, obviously—it's like being there in the mixing studio or concert hall. For home theater, the benefit is that Dolby TrueHD achieves compression efficiencies of 2:1 and as high as 4:1 over uncompressed PCM. Audiophiles might not be too thrilled about that, since the big beneficiary there is that you free up more bit space for picture quality, but with 15GB per layer on HD DVD and 25GB/layer on Blu-ray, you also have room for multiple TrueHD soundtracks."

Food for thought, Mr. Eggers. I'm not convinced my listening room is going to have a Blu-ray or HD DVD player in it any time soon, but my A/V room might very well house a TrueHD player before long—especially now that John Atkinson has gotten me addicted to concert DVDs.