Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater New Dolby Pro Logic format: IIz

The studio MGD has been recording what they call 2+2+2 (a 6.0 setup with two top speakers up front) for a few years already. Here is a link to a white paper. http://www.2plus2plus2.info/2%2B2%2B2%20Flyer/222flyer_Engl_104_low.pdf

I am not exactly sure what the difference would be in sound between this and just adding another pair of smaller L/R speakers mounted high on the wall behind the existing L/R speakers. This will give you the "height" they refer to. Many receiver brands i.e Yamaha, Denon and Marantz have had this capability for years of hooking up an additional pair of L/R speakers, if you wanted it. Of course, Yamaha, has had this "presence" speaker feature which basically gave a little more depth to the front soundstage.

I have always contended that when it came to speakers, the "more the merrier". I mentioned in an an earlier thread, I have totally gone against the grain of what is "perceived" to be HT "by the book". In addition to the above 4 speaker L/R configuration, I am running "two" center channels and "four" RS speakers one M22 AND QS8 in each channel. I also have two RB surrounds. Of course, I have two multi-channel power amps to drive all this stuff.

I have always contended A/V should be about fun and trying different things. For me, it is easy to say since I have a large room and a reasonable WAF. It is quite funny though, once you balance everything properly and you get used to all this sound coming at you, when you atempt to pair down the numbers, it is just not the same anymore.

Because it is part of ProLogic, there'll be some processing involved to try to extract the height information from the other channels. So it isn't just replicating other existing channels. Did you look at the Dolby page: http://www.dolby.com/consumer/technology/prologic-IIz.html ? It explains the technology a little.

I took your advice and checked the Dolby website, however, I must admit, as an owner of a number of "flagship" Yamaha receivers in the past, after reading the description of this process, to me anyway, it has a startling resemblance to the "presence" channel effect that Yamaha has had for years which also could be "overlayed" over any surround effect. One advantage of the Yamaha set-up is that you could blend the "presence" effect in to the existing L/R speakers without adding the extra pair. I know probably the Dolby technology is more advanced, however, it still means adding an extra pair of speakers that many, for whatever reason, may not want to do.

Anyway, it looks like another piece of technology that Dolby will license out to the manufacturers to add to their stable of surround effects in their products.

From my reading of it, they don't seem to be planning to use discrete channels in the bitstream for these height channels (yet anyway), instead they'll be matrixed much as the original Dolby Surround/ProLogic, or extracted algorithmically from non-encoded sources (like ProLogic II(x) Music). So if you don't have the extra speakers the information won't be extracted from the existing channels and nothing will change in your playback. Plus I imagine if they ever start making them discrete, there'll be a downmix option (probably with an encoding scheme for compatibility with older receivers which don't support the new bitsteam format).

I would imagine to stay away from any possible lawsuits from Yamaha, this whole scheme will end up being descrete channels with down mixing for the those with out the extra channels, as the way it sits right now, it looks to be waaayyy too similar to the whole presence idea, unless they are just building on Yamaha's idea and are already looking to pay them for the technology or possibly developed it for Yamaha already and are now happy with the results to start licensing it to others.

Given that it is an evolution of the ProLogic technology, I doubt it is discrete. Everything on their page makes it sound like it's going to be an encoding scheme, but with enough supplementary audio information that the decoder will be able to derive a specific height. Look what they say about games using the Z-axis.

If it is really that close to what Yamaha is doing, I'd say that Yamaha is probably licensing some technology from Dolby. Dolby has been doing research into matrix encoding and ambiance processing since the '60s. (Which is why DTS's Neo:6 isn't all that great, they were trying to re-invent the wheel without being able to use anything which is round.)

I want it.

I want to visit Hawaii.

I want a $1,000,000.00 which would allow me enough time off, cash to get there and stay for awhile, etc.