Tensilica HiFi DSPs with Dolby Atmos for Soundbars

Do you know what a soundbar is?

Years ago, if you wanted to build a good home theater then you'd need a TV projector (or a projection TV) costing over $10,000, and a set of expensive speakers to go with your Dolby 5.1 ("five point one") surround sound system. You'd set them up with one column of speakers to the left of the screen, one to the right, one horizontally underneath the screen, two surround sound speakers at the back (making five in all). Oh, and a subwoofer (the point one) hidden away somewhere. I actually built a home theater like that in the late 1990s when we remodeled our house in Los Gatos. And where I live now came with five speakers in the ceiling already set up for 5.1 sound.

Today, you don't need to do that. You can buy a decent size 4K TV for around $300, or something top-of-the-line for a couple of thousand. Instead of installing a traditional home theater audio system, you can purchase a soundbar that easily fits underneath the screen, which eliminates the need for additional speakers in your ceiling. And most importantly, there have been new advances in audio technology, such as Dolby Atmos — which is a leap forward from surround sound.

Dolby Atmos

So what is Dolby Atmos? Dolby Atmos transports listeners from an ordinary stereo sound into an experience with immersive audio — sound that flows all around you. In my post CES18 Preview, I described my experience listening to Dolby Atmos on a PC in a conference room at Cadence. This was by no means a perfect audio environment, nor would anyone consider a PC using its built-in speakers to be high-fidelity. I wrote:

This year [2018], some of the newer PCs include Tensilica running Dolby Atmos. The normal thing to say is that "you have to see this to believe it," but in this case, "you have to hear this to believe it." Running on some laptops that you can just go and buy, and using just the built-in speakers that such PCs come with, the sound seems to be completely three dimensional, moving around as you listen, even seeming to come from above despite the speakers being on the desk in front of you. It is the most impressive audio demo I can remember. You get a lot of the same effect as having five speakers with just the two speakers built into the laptop.  

As I wrote a year before in my post Dolby Atmos and Tensilica, at CES18 we worked with Dolby and LG to enable the first TV to support Dolby Atmos through the TV’s built-in speakers. Since then, more TV companies have jumped on board.

Over the past few years, Dolby Atmos soundbars have also become more widespread. Soundbars vary a lot in price from a couple of hundred dollars up to ones that cost as much as the TV in the thousands of dollars, such as the one in the image below with 13 "drivers" (speakers to normal people). In the image below, there are nine pointing forward, one pointing left, one pointing right, and two pointing up. When paired with Dolby Atmos, the device is able to position audio objects anywhere in the space.

When I said above that today you can just use a soundbar, it was a subtle way of making an announcement. Today, we are announcing that we are bringing the latest implementation of Dolby Atmos to our Tensilica HiFi DSP home audio offering, the best selling audio IP family, which will enable our customers to integrate Dolby Atmos into their soundbar products. This will include support for wireless speakers. Cadence (or rather our over 100 licensees) ship 1-2B HiFi cores per year. 

That immediately raises the question as to whether there is stuff to listen to. As manufacturers bring Dolby Atmos to more home entertainment devices, consumers need access to compatible content. There are now over 2,000 movies and TV episodes available in Dolby Atmos along with top video games, major global sporting events (remember them?), and music from some of the world’s top artists that are being delivered in Dolby Atmos. Most importantly, this now includes streaming. Nobody wants to have to go back to discs just to get good sound. Apple TV+, Disney+, Netflix, Prime Video, VUDU, and more, all have some content with Dolby Atmos sound.

So when you enjoy your favorite form of entertainment on a Dolby Atmos soundbar, you may be listening to a HiFi DSP making all the magic work.

Learn More

For more information, see the Tensilica Audio/Voice product page.

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