Surrounded by the sounds of Dolby

In the last week, I've spent a lot time looking at, listening to, and at times thoroughly enjoying, things with the Dolby logo on them. This week I got a new AV amplifier to play with, courtesy of Onkyo, and I visited Dolby’s London offices, thanks to Medion. But more on those later.

The Dolby name and logo have appeared ubiquitously on audio and video equipment, and the media we play upon them, for my entire life. Going back as far as Dolby Noise Reduction reducing the hiss on cassette tapes, and Dolby Stereo at my local single screen cinema. More recently, Dolby Digital from games and DVDs has become a cornerstone of home cinema surround sound.

PC surround sound and home cinema surround haven’t always worked together. PCs didn't support home cinema standards, like Dolby Digital, instead using their own Soundblaster-derived standards which dated back to the multimedia PC boom in the nineties (when CD-ROM drives and soundcards became popular). The PC's soundcard would do the crucial digital to analogue conversion process, and then the analogue audio would be output to a surround sound speaker system, which included a built-in amplifier.

Over the last few years compatibility with home cinema standards, like Dolby Digital, has been provided by DVD playback software like WinDVD and PowerDVD. We've also seen S/PDIF outputs become commonplace on PCs and laptops, making it simple to pass digital audio out to an AV receiver. However, I doubt that many people used these connections, with the obvious exception of media centre PC owners, simply because having to connect your laptop to your TV and an AV receiver to watch a DVD seems like a lot of hassle.

Things have improved of late with the introduction of HDMI. This digital equivalent of the SCART cable provides audio and video over a single connection perfect if you want to plug your laptop into your HD TV. It’s also a requirement if you want to use the uncompressed digital audio on Blu-ray movies, as S/PDIFs simply don’t have enough bandwidth for all that data. Because of this, it was decided we should update our test home cinema test equipment.

Japanese home cinema specialists Onkyo seemed like the obvious choice. In recent years they've pushed the home cinema market forward with some staggeringly good, but very aggressively priced hardware. They slashed hundreds of pounds off the price of an AV Receiver with support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio (the high-quality uncompressed audio standards found on most Blu-ray movies) and won numerous awards from the Hi-Fi press. This combination of high-quality and low prices seemed to fit best with Shopper's outlook, and so we were delighted when Onkyo agreed to supply us with their latest budget model, the TX-SR606, for testing purposes. It costs around £350 inc VAT from www.superfi.co.uk.

The SR606, like many AV receivers, is a truly massive device. I do a lot of our home cinema testing at home, as the office isn't an ideal place to be testing high-end audio equipment, as there's simply too much background noise. Having hauled this monster piece of kit home, it then took a whole evening to plumb the thing in (sounds like a pain but if you don’t masochistically enjoy this kind of thing then home cinema is probably not for you).

The results are, predictably, stunning. The Dolby TrueHD soundtrack on the Iron Man Blu-ray was bursting with detail. It’s hard to describe high-end audio in text without sounding like some idiot on a wine programme, but if you’re considering upgrading your home cinema kit then my advice is to go ahead and treat yourself for Christmas – you won’t be disappointed.

As I mentioned earlier, I went to meet the nice people at Dolby last week. Medion, the German PC manufacturer who has won a few Shopper awards recently, was launching its new laptop. It includes a Bu-ray drive and a HDMI output, so you can hook it up to your HDTV, or a receiver like the SR606, and appreciate the full video and audio resolution of your movie.

With The Dark Knight out on Blu-ray today, this Christmas could be the make or break time for the HD movie format. It’s success certainly isn’t guaranteed, though with players coming down to £150 inc VAT, it certainly has an opportunity now to break out from its current enthusiast niche. A lot has been made of the enhanced picture quality on these discs, but I think that the superior audio is just as impressive.


Seth Barton