Optimized Audio: The Next Frontier for Mobile Users’ Experience

The battle for our ears on mobile platforms is well underway.

In 1983 I was handling promotions for a Las Vegas style showroom in Denver, Colo. The Turn of The Century booked national acts as they flew between coasts on tour. Weekends were easy. Three nights, six shows of acts including Gladys and her Pips, Loretta Lynn, Ella Fitzgerald, and Bill Cosby. However, booking acts to fill the hall midweek was a challenge.

Around mid-year we were approached by Walt Stinson, founder of Listen Up, the region’s high-end audio and video retail store, who along with a consortium of consumer electronics companies and content providers wanted to host the Rocky Mountain regional launch of digital CDs at our 1,200-seat venue on a week night. Digital music CDs? Who knew? Walt did. His small company would become the largest retailer of Sony CDs in the United States that year. Walt (W0CP) would also go on to become the Rocky Mountain Regional Director of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) and in 2009 was named to the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame along with Dr. Irwin Jacobs of Qualcomm and Apple’s Steve Jobs. In short, Walt recognized the potential for digital and radio far ahead of the curve.

The digital audio revolution of early 1983 would eventually become the category killer of the recording industry, devastating the market for vinyl 33-1/3 rpm albums. The new technology required a digital CD player, originally launched by a joint venture of Sony and Philips Consumer Electronics, to be hooked up to your home audio system. In a matter of months, FM radio stations were touting the broad collection of digital CDs they played and within a year or so some stations positioned themselves as “All CDs [digital], all the time.” That was a great positioning statement and differentiator from their competition, but it ignored a significant gap in the delivery channel. These all-digital radio stations might have played only digital CDs, but their broadcast signal would be analog for many years to come and home audio system receivers and tuners were also analog. Broadcasting digital content via analog signals to analog receivers offered no significant enhancement to the listeners. It provided little more than what we would experience today receiving a High-Definition (HD) video signal on a non-High-Definition monitor. You have to have end-to-end digital connectivity to be able to appreciate the benefits of digital technology.

Within the mobile audio space, there has been a chasm between the level of quality content creators are able to produce in the studio and the mobile device user experience. There is no end-to-end solution that allows mobile users to truly benefit from the enhanced audio quality generated at the source. Dolby Labs is working to change this inequity. For the past few months, Dolby has been demonstrating its 5.1 HD level surround sound for smartphones. A brief history of Dolby Labs establishes its audio credentials. It began providing noise reduction technology for consumer audio systems in the late 1960s and in the late 1970s it broadened its offerings to include stereo optical sound for 35mm film, attracting a lot attention with the release of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The battle for our ears on mobile platforms is well underway. In addition to Dolby’s presence in the mobile market, several other audio technology companies have joined the chase to satisfy the ever-expanding demand for a superior mobile user experience. With 3D gaming and video on phones such as the LG Optimus 3D P920 and HTC’s EVO 3D, consumers will demand the very best audio they can get. Both Audyssey and DTS, Inc. are working on improving audio quality in mobile devices. Audyssey, with a background in home, car, and theater audio is promoting its Premium Mobile Suite. Audyssey’s solution tweaks and optimizes voice and audio on the mobile device by enhancing the performance of the speakers and amplification process. Its solution claims to reduce volume swings and pump up the bass. In addition, Audyssey’s solution automatically compensates for ambient noise. DTS, formerly Digital Theater Systems, cut its teeth in the commercial and home theater audio markets. Its decoders are installed in many multi-channel surround sound processors. DTS is also focused on enhancing the audio experience on mobile devices. Both DTS and Dolby play in the 5.1 surround sound space, but on the mobile platform, DTS is focused on enhancing the users’ experience for games and sideloaded music.

Getting back to the digital CD to analog relationship, the content originally recorded in a digital format and released on digital CDs, is converted to analog long before it reaches the listeners’ ears. Digital, smigital. If you don’t have an end-to-end digital solution, you don’t have “the” digital solution. You only have a piece or two of it. It’s cool to be able to have a better experience listening to your sideloaded music or the audio on those games, but what about listening to Pandora Radio or My Heart Radio programs? There may be a better experience with tweaked onboard audio, but it’s not “exceptional.” Enhancing onboard audio and video solely on the device is great, but it doesn’t mitigate the audio degradation issues when the content is coming to you through content aggregators and the operator’s network. Operators and device manufacturers have to keep in mind the marketing adage, “It’s not just about meeting customer’s expectations. We must exceed their expectations.” Doing so will create the “exceptional experience” that will enable their products and services to excel in today’s high quality demand market.

This seems to be where Dolby is differentiating itself from its competition. Dolby’s plan is to implement its proprietary technologies all along the distribution/transmission channel, from creation of the content to its processing and delivery by aggregators to wireless operators and ultimately its retransmission over the network to end users’ mobile devices. Dolby’s four digital components, Dolby Media Generator, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Pulse, and Dolby Mobile stand to offer a real enhancement at the end user level. Dolby is demoing effective enhancements in audio quality at rates as low as 24 Kbps, and far better quality at 48-96 Kbps. And a Dolby enhanced phone is capable of driving 5.1 surround sound on a large LCD monitor. As impressive as the demos are, they are not fully end-to-end. The middle part is missing. Dolby’s challenge will be getting buy-in for its total set of solutions along the complexity of the content distribution channels. Every step, from creation of content to the mobile device, must be integrated. It took years for digital radio to really become digital radio. Given the motivation of operators to leverage and load their new high-speed networks, perhaps we’ll see the lightening-speed rise in smartphone ownership ignite the implementation of true end-to-end solutions such as Dolby’s. Better audio quality will generate more over-the-air video streaming, interactive gaming, and music downloads, which will be good for those operators that have the bandwidth to deliver.

Bob Chapin