lini
Thought the last line in Citizen Kane was nosebud.
I got a visit from Dolby Labs in the office today. They are on a promo tour through Germany at the moment - it's all about their "Dolby in PC"-initiative, and they show which Dolby technologies have already found their way into personal computers and give some outlooks into the future. Being the inofficial audio man in the hardware section of one of the major German computer magazines, I got the honour of the presentation - which also included a short demo of Dolby Virtual Speaker: Like Dolby Headphone on stereo headphones, Dolby Virtual Speaker can be fed with a 5.1-signal (which itself could be a native Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack or just a stereo signal upgraded to 5.1 by Dolby ProLogic II) and will reproduce this on a stereo spaker system.
To cut the long story short: The set-up was a Dell Latitude series notebook with Windows XP and an el-cheapo pair of powered 2.0 computer speakers by Labtec placed closely to the edges of the display plus me sitting in the sweet-spot - and played from the DVD drive were the outtakes of Toy Story (2?). To my surprise, it really worked, and the quality was very impressive for that low quality set-up. I could clearly identify the director's comments from the back - well, back right, actually. And yes, the very friendly and cool Dolby guy from Britain (who ran the presentation and has very sensible opinions on Microsoft, DRM and logoitis on surround equipment - just to name some of the topics we discussed...
Actually, I'm still pondering whether I should invite him here - what do you think?) confirmed that Dolby Virtual Speaker was also able to produce stereo imaging in the back - just like Dolby Headphone.
Well, me thinks that this is a nice technology with quite some potential - and much better than stuffing speakers all over my place for the occasional surround experience. Now, how can I convince Jan to make me a PreHead Surround Extra Plus DAC Lini Special Edition <enter more nifty terms like Turbo, Hypra, Supra, MkII, OSE here...
> with some more analog inputs (including phono), a built-in dac, some optical and electrical S/P-DIF inputs, Dolby ProLogic II, Digital 5.1, Virtual Speaker and Headphone, a mono switch as well as defeatable balance and tone control for <hybris mode on
> 1500 Euro? Uhm...
Greetings and grinnings from Munich!
Manfred / lini
To cut the long story short: The set-up was a Dell Latitude series notebook with Windows XP and an el-cheapo pair of powered 2.0 computer speakers by Labtec placed closely to the edges of the display plus me sitting in the sweet-spot - and played from the DVD drive were the outtakes of Toy Story (2?). To my surprise, it really worked, and the quality was very impressive for that low quality set-up. I could clearly identify the director's comments from the back - well, back right, actually. And yes, the very friendly and cool Dolby guy from Britain (who ran the presentation and has very sensible opinions on Microsoft, DRM and logoitis on surround equipment - just to name some of the topics we discussed...
Well, me thinks that this is a nice technology with quite some potential - and much better than stuffing speakers all over my place for the occasional surround experience. Now, how can I convince Jan to make me a PreHead Surround Extra Plus DAC Lini Special Edition <enter more nifty terms like Turbo, Hypra, Supra, MkII, OSE here...
Greetings and grinnings from Munich!
Manfred / lini