There were all manner of eye-catching products vying for headlines at the 2019 CES. Our eager eyes were dazzled by rollable OLED TVs, 200-inch plus Micro LED ‘walls’, 8K TVs, transparent screens… Hell, there was even a full-sized yacht in the North Hall.
For me, though, the brand that made the biggest all-round impact across the whole CES was Dolby.
Dolby's presence could be felt pretty much everywhere you went on the show floor, from TVs to physical and streamed media, set-top boxes, PCs and laptops, mobile phones, tablets, speakers, AV receivers, and 4K Blu-ray players. Even better, as I’ll get into more later, I got the feeling that Dolby is starting to work more closely with individual brands on ever-more imaginative hardware projects to help them get the most from Dolby’s picture and sound enhancing technologies.
What made all this progress even more striking for me at the CES is the fact that as recently as just three years ago, Dolby’s dreams of home entertainment dominance still felt very much in the balance. Its Dolby Vision HDR system was struggling to find a foothold with some of the world’s biggest TV brands, and was afflicted by some frustrating technical issues. Its Dolby Atmos audio system was doing OK in high end home theater systems, but was barely a twinkle in the eye of affordable, mainstream, ‘living room’ products.
Dolby Atmos even seemed to be struggling against its DTS rival where Blu-ray discs were concerned. A quick headcount of my own Blu-ray collection found DTS accounting for a comfortable majority of the soundtracks.
At this year’s CES, though, it honestly started to feel strange when I came across a serious AV product that didn’t support Dolby Atmos or Dolby Vision - or both.
Just look, for starters, at all these CES announcements based around Dolby tech:
TVs
* Panasonic announced support for Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos for the first time on its flagship OLED TV, the GZ2000. This is the first TV to integrate upward firing speakers capable of delivering Dolby Atmos.
* Joining Dolby Vision, Sony announced that it is integrating Dolby Atmos into its flagship Z9G and A9G TVs.
* LG also announced support for both Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos in its 2019 OLED and Super UHD TVs.
* VIZIO announced support for Dolby Vision on its new P-Series Quantum X, P-Series Quantum, M-Series, and V-Series (formerly the E-Series).
* Hisense announced support for Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos on its new 2019 R8 Series as well as Dolby Vision support on its U9F Series TVs.
* TCL, ChangHong, and Skyworth also announced support of Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos on new TVs. (Konka went down the same path in 2018, too)
* LG Display announced that it will introduce an 88” 8K Crystal Sound OLED display, which is compatible with Dolby Atmos.
Sound Bars
* Sony announced support for Dolby Atmos on its new 2019 HT-X8500 sound bar, which is one of the first to integrate dual built-in subwoofers.
* LG announced support for Dolby Atmos on its new 2019 SL10, SL9, and SL8 sound bars.
* VIZIO announced its new 2019 36” 5.1.4 and 36” 3.1.2 Home Theater Systems with Dolby Atmos.
PCs
* Dell announced support for Dolby Vision on its first PC, the XPS 13.
* Lenovo expanded its support of Dolby Vision and/or Dolby Atmos to seven new devices ranging from its latest X1 devices, consumer laptops, as well as its latest line up of gaming machines. The full breakdown of Lenovo devices is as follows: X1 Yoga and Carbon (Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos Speaker System); Yoga S940 – Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos Speaker System; Yoga A940 – Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos Speaker System; Yoga C730 – Dolby Atmos; Legion Y740 – Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos Speaker System; Legion Y540 – Dolby Atmos
This plethora of CES specific announcements arrived, moreover, on the back of a remarkable couple years of Dolby momentum. There’s been far too much activity to cover everything, but even if I just pick out the highlights we get this lot: 14 TV OEMs now support Dolby Vision; four of the five top sound bar manufacturers support Dolby Atmos; two of the three top PC manufacturers now integrate Dolby Vision into their PCs; the top 2 Android phone makers, Samsung and Huawei, integrate Dolby Atmos into their latest mobile devices; Dolby Vision is now supported on the latest Apple iPhones and iPad Pros, while the Apple TV 4K now supports both Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos.
The Xbox One X and S, meanwhile, now support both Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision - with the Atmos support applying to games as well as video playback. PC games have been released with both Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision support. Eight streaming services now provide Dolby Vision and Atmos, including Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Finally, Dolby Atmos sound is (currently) finding wider adoption on 4K Blu-ray than it did on HD Blu-ray.
Add all this recent ‘history’ to the numerous eye-catching CES announcements, and it was seriously hard to move without running into some level of Dolby influence. So much so that at this CES more than any before, Dolby technology now felt like something hardware brands were falling over themselves to adopt, rather than it feeling any more as if Dolby was still having to work hard to persuade brands to take its formats on.
On the opposite side of the coin, brands which hadn’t adopted Dolby technologies at the CES were starting to look increasingly isolated. Especially now that growing public awareness of Dolby means that more and more consumers are looking for and expecting to find Dolby features on their new AV hardware. This is all a far cry from me wondering a couple of CESes ago if Dolby Vision, at least, was in danger of floundering.
As I mentioned briefly earlier, it’s not just the sheer quantity of Dolby-supporting kit that stood out at the 2019 CES. Some of the products on show also suggest that now the brand has achieved its first steps of getting its licensed products inside a really wide range of products, and awareness of its products in plenty of AV fans’ minds, it feels more ready to start working more closely with various brands to deliver innovative hardware features that better show off what Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos are capable of.
Panasonic’s GZ2000 TV, for instance, stood out spectacularly at the 2019 CES thanks to its innovative new Dolby Atmos sound system (designed with support from Dolby), complete with integrated soundbar and unique upfiring speakers built into a column on its rear.
Or how about Sony’s new Z9G 8K TVs, which combine their new adoption of Dolby Atmos sound with an innovative speaker system comprising two speakers along the bottom edge and two along the top edge.
Dolby also collaborated extensively with Lenovo on the hardware design of the new X1 ThinkPad, creating a customized four-speaker Dolby Atmos Speaker System.
It’s developed, too, a new Dolby Vision feature for LG’s OLED TVs that takes into account room conditions, as well as recently finding time to create its own unique and remarkably clever Dolby Dimension headphones.
It should be said that Senior Vice President of Dolby’s Consumer Entertainment Group Giles Baker doesn’t necessarily see these headphones as the first step in a comprehensive new range of Dolby-branded hardware. “Dolby is about bringing better experiences to consumers, and usually this involves working with other hardware brands. The Dolby Dimension headphones just represented a moment for us where we thought we could add something to a specific part of the home entertainment experience that wasn’t yet being catered for elsewhere.”
Despite its 2019 CES confidence, there are, of course, still challenges for Dolby to overcome. Baker mentioned one of these as I chatted with him on Dolby’s CES stand. “We want to change the entertainment experience, to make it into something spectacular. But we want to do that for everyone. We don’t want the sort of experiences Dolby technology can deliver to only be available at a really premium level. At the same time, though, we need to achieve this without losing sight of what makes the Dolby experience special. We always want consumers to be asking ‘How do I get this?’, not ‘Why do I need this?"
Also, while Dolby’s move to a software-based version of Dolby Vision a couple of years back (rather than continuing to rely on built-in hardware) certainly opened the door to Dolby greatly expanding the reach of its premium HDR format, it also created some pretty major ‘wrinkles’ for consumers as the software implementations rolled out across various products. Including, most recently, issues with the Xbox Dolby Vision implementation not working with some supposedly Dolby Vision capable TVs (as reported here).
World number one TV brand Samsung is still holding out against implementing either Dolby Vision or Dolby Atmos in its TVs too. Plus the latest CES saw the emergence of some potential new competition in the shape of Sony’s Atmos-challenging 360 sound system; a renewed (though now feeling rather belated) push for the HDR10+ alternative to Dolby Vision; and the IMAX Enhanced platform, complete with a DTS-based sound system.
Interesting though these newcomers might be, though, my overwhelming realization at CES was of the uphill battle they all face if they want to make a serious dent in Dolby’s now firmly established dominance. Especially as Baker made it clear to me that Dolby has no intention of resting on its laurels: “The AV world is reinventing what spectacular means all the time. So Dolby always has to keep moving on too. There are always new challenges in every area of the home entertainment experience that Dolby is ideally placed to have a big role in.
“The arrival of 8K TVs, for instance,” Baker continues, “brings whole new standards of experience for us to work with. But at the same time we’re also working with smart speaker manufacturers to improve both the sound quality and voice capture capabilities of their devices.
“Essentially there’s a huge opportunity in providing performance enhancing systems that can scale all the way from 100-inch 8K TVs right down to mobile phones, adapting fluidly to the different demands of such radically different environments. Dolby technologies are embedded throughout the ecosystem, from content creation, through distribution, to playback, and this enables us to invent solutions that others cannot.”
On the back of its 2019 CES showing, the coming 12 months are already shaping up to be hugely successful ones for Dolby. Which for me is something that should be good news for everyone - especially now that Dolby’s influence on the home entertainment world is starting to extend further than ever before beyond mere licensing.
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