Surround Sound Is All Around
Our woman in music samples 13.1 Dolby TrueHD and other surround-sound options.Narasu Rebbapragada, PC World
Got a prediction on the future of surround sound? Send me an e-mail.
I blazed through two trade shows in seven days this month. Amidst the blur, one trend stood out: Surround sound is blowing downwind, showing up in more moderately priced PC-centric products.
One impressive technology demo was held at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. In a soundproof booth, Dolby Laboratories demonstrated a home theater equipped with 13.1-channel surround sound. Needless to say, it sounded amazing; an excerpt from the movie 2 Fast 2 Furious was awesome.
The point of the demo was that 13.1 is the theoretical maximum number of channels that can be handled by Dolby's new TrueHD, a lossless (read: uncompressed) audio technology for HD-DVD content. TrueHD is the lossless standard for HD-DVD and an optional format for Blu-ray Disc. Right now, however, HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc support up to 7.1-channel audio, so you'll have to break into Dolby's San Francisco sound lab to hear what I heard.
Hot AV Notebook
Until 13.1-channel audio trickles down to your living room--and that's going to be a while--you'll be able to travel with 7.1-channel TrueHD on the upcoming Toshiba Qosmio AV notebook with an HD-DVD drive.
The Qosmio AV supports all sorts of Dolby standards. Here's a rundown of them, in case you're curious:
Toshiba has yet to divulge details on pricing and availability.
Surround Sound Over FireWire
Two days after I returned from CES, I popped over to the Macworld Expo here in San Francisco and visited reps for a company called Oxford Semiconductor, which makes chips for storage, audio, and consumer electronic products. They were showing off the glamorously named OXFW971 chip, which allows a device to transmit up to 7.1-channel audio over a FireWire connection.
I should add that Oxford Semiconductor is part of an industry group called the High-Definition Audio-Video Alliance, which would like FireWire to be the universal connector among all consumer electronics products. This is an interesting alternative to the already well-established HDMI format, proposing the intriguing option of linking your TV-centric network to your PC-based network, which likely has a FireWire port somewhere on it.
Oxford Semiconductor was demonstrating the Griffin FireWave, which runs off of the OXFW971. This $99 white, flat box connects to a Mac (which can't process true Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound on its own) and allows users to output true surround sound to 5.1-channel speakers.
Why am I writing about a Mac-compatible product? Because I think the concept of transmitting surround sound over FireWire is tantalizing. FireWire was designed to carry and prioritize high-bandwidth video and audio content--and it's a current IEEE standard, which provides the greatest chance that products from competing manufacturers could actually play nicely with each other. Stay tuned for future developments on this front.