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
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.
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.
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.
Narasu Rebbapragada, PC World
