Giant Interactive And Other Leading Media Companies Adopt Dolby TrueHD 96K Up-Sampling Technology

Our technical staff is always looking for ways to improve our offerings to clients, particularly in the area of providing the highest quality authoring and disc mastering services. It’s where Giant started and where we continue to excel. Though only made public today, Dolby Laboratories, known for their work in advancing the art and science of high-quality audio, recently improved upon their TrueHD technology with elevated playback performance of lossless audio on Blu-ray Discs. We’ve already used this on a recent project, San Francisco Symphony at 100, which was used as the ‘demo title’ in Dolby’s recent press event announcing this innovation within Dolby Media Producer Encoder v2. You can learn more about the use of this new technology on this release here via Vimeo.

“Lossless audio is a key distinguishing feature of Blu-ray content. All things being equal, you cannot improve on the quality of lossless audio coding; however, you can improve on the quality of the source PCM content prior to lossless encoding, and this is precisely what we have achieved with our advanced 96k upsampling technology,” said Craig Eggers, Director, Content Creation and Playback, Home Theater Ecosystem, Dolby Laboratories. “A significant amount of Hollywood content has been captured in native48 kHz. Studios and authoring facilities that implement Dolby TrueHD with advanced 96k upsampling can elevate the quality of PCM audio prior to lossless Dolby TrueHD encoding, ensuring that consumers get the very best audio performance possible from their Blu-ray playback systems.” This upsampling technology represents a true innovation in audio playback. “Besides enabling optimum 96k upsampling, this technology features a unique apodizing filter that “masks” the unwanted digital artifacts known as “preringing,” which is introduced during the content-capture and content-creation process. These digital artifacts can introduce an unnatural edginess or harshness to the audio. Dolby TrueHD with advanced 96k upsampling restores the natural tonality of the soundtrack. The effect can be subtle or dramatic, depending on the quality of the source material. Content mastered with Dolby TrueHD with advanced upsampling is fully playback compatible with all Dolby TrueHD enabled Blu-ray™ players and A/V receivers. Listeners are assured the highest-quality playback experiences possible through their systems. “We were particularly impressed with the excellent results of Dolby’s new Dolby TrueHD with advanced 96k upsampling on one of our most recent projects, the San Francisco Symphony at 100 Blu-ray,” said Luke Fazzary, Director of Operations, Giant Interactive. “We’re very pleased to be able to share the benefits of this technology with our clients and plan to use it on future projects, whether concerts, live-action films, or episodic programming.” We’ll be offering this new TrueHD upgrade to future clients, particularly those with legacy 48K audio tracks and are proud to be included in the select group participating in this roll-out. Those interested in learning more are encouraged to download the following PDF white papers: Dolby TrueHD Encoder with Advanced 96k Upsampling and Elevating the Performance of Lossless Audio in the Home Theater: Dolby TrueHD with Advanced 96k Upsampling.