In January 2012 , I wrote about Dolby Labs entering the audio conferencing market with wide-band spatially-oriented audio technology. At that time, I stated that the company needed to do a bit more to prove to me that it really had something differentiating. In the initial demo, there was nothing to compare Dolby’s audio with, so I challenged the Dolby team to provide a way for people to hear and immediately compare a narrow-band PSTN audio conference with a regular wide-band audio conference with a Dolby audio conference.
The company was up to the challenge at Enterprise Connect 2012, creating an environment in which the three types of audio conferences could be immediately and simultaneously tested. Dolby set up an Asterisk PBX that supported G.711 narrow-band audio and G.722 wideband audio.
Three different conferences were active simultaneously:
- A wideband audio conference anchored in the Asterisk PBX. All participants used a Cisco phone along with a mono headset.
- A narrow-band audio conference anchored in the Asterisk PBX. All participants used a Grandstream phone with a mono headset.
- A wideband audio conference anchored in Dolby’s media server. All participants used Mac personal computers with USB-based stereo headphones and spatial speaker orientation was enabled.
Both wideband conferences were clearly superior to the narrow band audio conference. The G.722 wideband audio was actually quite good. It was not stereo, but it did have good sound quality. The Dolby sound quality over the stereo headset and with the spatial orientation was excellent.
I asked if I could get a stereo headset for the G.722 wideband system, but we were unable to secure one at the moment.
To further test the different audio solutions, I asked the other participants to all speak at the same time.
In the narrow-band conference and in the G.722 wide-band conference, the audio was a garbled mess. In the Dolby conference, the difference in clarity was amazing. Even though multiple people were speaking over one another, the spatial audio though the stereo headphones made it possible to hear every speaker quite clearly. The topic of the conversation was what each speaker had for breakfast, and we dubbed this remarkably different sounding conference the “breakfast conversation”. Dolby continued to use this breakfast conversation throughout the three days of demonstrations as a way to show how it is a very different solution.
Here are the key takeaways to me:
- Dolby is on to something with its media server and client audio technology. The audio experience is clearly superior.
- When multiple people speak, Dolby’s audio is second to none. This is important because in an audio-only conference, there are no visual cues that enable people to avoid speaking over one another. This happens rather frequently, and the ability to distinguish these words and phrases is very helpful. Usually once people realize that someone else is speaking, one person stops, but this ability to distinguish words in these situations may relieve some of the cueing issues found in regular audio conferences.
- The Dolby solution does require stereo speakers or a stereo headset. This is an issue because most Bluetooth headsets and many high-end call center and executive Bluetooth, DECT, and wired headsets have only one ear bud or speaker. Dolby indicated that it is speaking with Bluetooth chipset manufacturers, encouraging them to develop stereo capabilities. (Plantronics was, interestingly enough, just across the hall from Dolby at this event, so the stereo headset message clearly got to that manufacturer.) At issue here is whether people will change their behavior and broadly adopt stereo headsets. From a vanity perspective, stereo headsets with a wire or a band connecting the ear buds or speakers will mess up a coiffed hairdo. Worrying about someone’s hair is possibly trivial, but probably not, particularly in an office setting or where people regularly switch between audio-only and video conferences.
- Dolby needs to address how the solution will work in a conference room. People will not come into a conference room and put on a headset.
Overall, the technology is very promising. The real question is whether people will pay just a little more for a high quality audio conference and will they use a headset. It may be that some audio conferencing solutions, delivered as a premises-based solution or through a conferencing service provider, may choose to offer Dolby’s audio conferencing capability as a key solution differentiator.