If there is a drawback to smartphones and tablets is that their speakers can hardly be called powerful. Sure, some of them are pretty loud and there are some OEMs who are trying their best to do something about it, like HTC with BoomSound and BlackBerry with Natural Sound technology.
However it seems like Dolby wants in on the game as well with their Dolby Atmos surround sound technology which the company is hoping to introduce to smartphones and tablets later this year.
The technology was shown off during MWC 2014 and apparently it can be made to run on a dedicated audio processor chip or an ARM processor thanks to special algorithms. Since smartphones and tablets’ speakers tend to either come in a pair or broadcasted through a single output, it can hardly be considered “surround sound”, right?
That’s where the technology comes in, which has been designed to trick our ears into thinking that what we are hearing is indeed surround sound. According to Joel Susal, Dolby Laboratories Product Manager for Mobile, “Atmos revolutionizes the way sound is created, communicated, and how it is disseminated. The artist is free to put the audio where it belongs.”
While Dolby aims to make Atmos surround sound available this year, it is unclear when it will be integrated into smartphones. However Dolby does state that the technology will be compatible with most mobile devices based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 chipset, which means that if you were hoping to see it integrated into already-announced flagship smartphones, you would be disappointed.
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