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Dolby PLII music


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When the wife and I are chillin' in the evenings and having some wine and making dinner, I like to put Pandora on the TV/home entertainment system and I like to use the Dolby PLII Music mode that takes the stereo signal and simulates 5.1 surround. Not as good as real 5.1 music, of course, but it's a nice effect. Especially for music that I'm not "seriously" listening to and just having in the background.

 

But can anyone here explain to me in relatively-layman terms how this works? How do they split the signal and what are they sending to the other speakers?

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Psssst . . . don't tell anyone. It's a secret. The concept of simulating stereo and surround channels has been around for a good while. It depends on frequency band splitting and time displacement. The trick is to do it in a realistic way, and this is something that Dolby has studied for many years and seems to do it better than anyone else or at least as good as DTS, the other company that's doing a lot of research into spatial perception. These are really smart companies.

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The guy to ask -- although maybe not for the in layman's terms part, he doesn't seem to work like that (though he can come up with some interesting analogies in his explanations) -- is James "JJ" Johnston, one of the key AT&T guys working on perceptual encoding back in the day. He's gone on to work on super sophisticated spatial effect simulation, as I understand it.

 

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-d...ston/0/186/607

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This article explains how you can get surround without having encoding. Using phase addition and cancellation is a key element. I didn't find specific info on Pro II but I'm sure its built on the older versions with additional enhancements to make the sound stage stable when emulating surround from a normal stereo signal.

 

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_8_1/dolby-prologic2-3-2001.html

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This article explains how you can get surround without having encoding. Using phase addition and cancellation is a key element. I didn't find specific info on Pro II but I'm sure its built on the older versions with additional enhancements to make the sound stage stable when emulating surround from a normal stereo signal.

 

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_8_1/dolby-prologic2-3-2001.html

 

 

Actually it addresses Pro Logic II at the end of the article, including a specific section on the "PLII Music" program I use. Thanks for that! Interesting read.

 

 

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