Yearning for immersive audio when watching video clips on your mobile? The boffins at Dolby Labs have found a way to deliver it.
With increasing amounts of audio and video content being stored and played using portable devices, work has focused on improving the quality of the sound they deliver.
There's not much point having the all the latest tracks or clips if they sound like you're listening to them through cotton wool. And how can you enjoy watching a movie if you can't appreciate the big-budget sound effects?
Developers at audio specialist Dolby Labs have created a new sound processing technology which greatly improves the quality of sound delivered by mobile phones and portable content players.
Called (not surprisingly) Dolby Mobile, the technology is targeted specifically at mobile handsets, but it could also be used inside any portable device.
The technology resides in a specially designed chip that takes the audio stream created by the device and performs a series of enhancements. By using a number of sophisticated processing algorithms it makes the sound appear to be coming from speakers away from your body rather than from the earphones you happen to be wearing.
During a demonstration for APCMag.com at the recent Mobile World Congress in Spain, a series of movie and music clips were played on a Nokia N95 smartphone.
The audio enhancement technology was switched on an off and the difference was astounding. The flat, two-dimensional sound usually generated by the phone was replaced with full, wrap-around audio.
The new Dolby chip also enhances both bass and high frequencies without them distorting or overriding each other. The result sounds as though you are sitting in your own personal cinema.
"It changes the way you make use of your digital content," says Dolby senior product manager Patrick Flannigan. "Just because you're using a portable device doesn't mean you have to accept lower-quality audio."
Because the technology is hardware based, it unfortunately can't be retrofitted into existing mobile devices. However Flannigan says Dolby is working closely with a range of manufacturers to have the chips included in future models.
The company has already signed agreements with Japan's NTT DoCoMo and Sharp. The first two handsets using the technology, the FOMA SH905i and FOMA SH905iTV, are already on the market in that country.