CES11: Dolby Digital Does Critial Damage

Written by Pedi Talai

Dolby Axon
Dolby Axon is a full 3D voice communication utility which greatly increases the audio experience between the player and their allies or enemies, and helps to further immerse the user in the game world. Axon is found in two different flavors; built into the games themselves, or operated from a standalone client.

Currently found in a number of top PC games in Asia (as well as Need for Speed World), Dolby Axon has been used in-game in such clever ways as a microphone-tipped spy dart, which allows you to eavesdrop on conversations where the dart has been fired. Axon adjusts dynamically with the environment, changing as rapidly as the game setting you find yourself in. If you get closer to your teammates, you'll hear them louder. Distance yourself from your squad, and their levels decrease. The occlusion engine intensifies the effects, allowing you faithfully reproduce hearing a voice from around a corner, and similarly muting a voice heard behind a wall or shield. Dolby Axon also features voice fonts, which allows the player to alter and mask their voice in a multitude of ways. Believe it or not, the Axon package, while high quality, sends voice at low bandwidths to assure low latency, even between thousands of users per server, scaling seamlessly between multiple servers.

Outside of the game world, Dolby Axon is looking to one-up programs like Ventrilo and TeamSpeak (and perhaps even Skype), and from what we've seen, easily does so. The client supports up to 50 users, each able of adjusting their position on a virtual grid, as well as their direction in a full 360 degrees. The program is currently available for Windows, with a Mac release scheduled for sometime this spring.

Dolby Home Theater 4
Dolby will be releasing the follow-up to their Home Theater v3 audio software later this year. Home Theater v4 turns a laptop's mundane audio output into a cinematic aural experience by allowing the user various control options that will maximize the sound quality of your music, movies, and games, effectively eliminating any other way to listen to them.

Home Theater v4 will intelligently disseminate info from the track and convert stereo to 5.1, or 5.1 to 7.1. This allows vocals and background noise to be spread across the sound spectrum accurately, and makes audio much more pleasing to the ears. Of course this is something that needs to be heard to truly appreciated, but you can take it from us that it's nothing short of amazing. While Home Theater v4 has an available gaming preset, unfortunately we were not able to see it in action, as Dolby instead chose to focus showing this technology via movies and music. Nonetheless, we're sure Home Theater v4 will have the same wow-factor on game audio as it does with other audio mediums.

Home Theater v4 will only be available pre-installed on certain Acer laptops in spring of this year. There are plans to make the software available on other Windows based computers, but nothing has yet to be officially announced by Dolby or their partners.