Dolby Laboratories Showcases DVD-Audio At CES 2000

Dolby Laboratories, the world leader in multichannel sound, demonstrated DVD-Audio technology at this year's Winter CES in Las Vegas. With its high-resolution and multichannel audio capability, DVD-Audio is expected to succeed the compact disc as the audio standard in consumer electronics. Dolby will demonstrate DVD-Audio utilizing amplifiers by Proceed, Infinity's new Prelude MTS speakers, and the Technics model DVD-A10 player.As it allows musicians to record in 5.1-channel sound, DVD-Audio holds promise as an exciting new format for the music industry. Consumers will soon be able to experience 5.1-channel sound while listening to their favorite artists.In another step forward, Meridian Lossless Packaging (MLP) has been developed by the Meridian Audio Group, a privately held company based in the U.K. MLP is a lossless coding algorithm that saves space on DVD-Audio discs by storing advanced high-rate PCM data more efficiently, while maintaining all the information bit-for-bit. It will be offered on all DVD-Audio players providing up to 96-kHz/24-bit performance in both 5.1-channel and a separate, dedicated two-channel mix on the same layer of one side of the disc. There is also the capability of a two-channel downmix of the 5.1-channel mix, if desired.MLP was developed as part of Meridian's efforts to advance the state-of-the-art for new audio formats, such as DVD. A proprietary development of Meridian Audio, MLP will be licensed by Dolby Laboratories to manufacturers of integrated circuits, and encoding and decoding equipment.The DVD-Audio standard is the only official format dedicated to multichannel music. It offers 5.1 channels, and simultaneously a separate two-channel mix, in 96-kHz sampling and 24-bit wordlength PCM (Pulse Code Modulation). No lossy coding is involved, resulting in 100 percent of the PCM data retained with bit-for-bit accuracy. DVD-Audio discs provide more than twice the number of data samples of a compact disc (96,000 times per second vs. CD's 44,100 times per second). Furthermore, each data sample in a DVD-Audio disc is a 24-bit word (compared to 16 bits on a CD), which provides much greater resolution. Dynamic range is increased an incredible 48 dB. Most importantly, the number of channels is tripled. Consumers can now use their home theatres to enjoy multichannel sound for music, movies, and music videos.