New, more sophisticated cinema audio formats have recently been developed and deployed that provide a more immersive sound field for the audience members. This paper discusses techniques that can reduce the economic costs associated with the installation and maintenance of the audio reproduction devices in contemporary immersive digital cinema, while best retaining the benefits of these new formats. The focus of this paper is novel bass management techniques that enable the use of cost-effective loudspeakers. These proposed bass processing methods take advantage of the reduced spatial saliency of low frequency audio and allow for a reduced spatial resolution for audio signals in that range. We present subjective tests conducted in a state of the art cinema installation that illustrate the effects of the proposed solutions on sound quality. Some of the these techniques have been incorporated to the future version of the Dolby Atmos cinema specification.

Authors: Hirvonen, Toni; Robinson, Charles Q.
Affiliations: Dolby Laboratories, Stockholm, Sweden; Dolby Laboratories, San Francisco, CA, USA(See document for exact affiliation information.)
AES Convention: 140 (May 2016) Paper Number: 9595
Publication Date: May 26, 2016 Import into BibTeX
Subject: Immersive Audio
Permalink: https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18293

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