From providing captivating experiences at cinemas, Dolby Atmos sets its sights on cars

The first time Indians got to experience Dolby Atmos in their homeland was at a cinema in Chennai over a decade ago. Now, having made inroads into the world of devices and content creation, Dolby is now looking to make the in-car experience a lot more livelier and richer through its technologies.

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Dolby’s Global Automobile Business Group Head, Andreas Ehret, is the right man to explain just how the company plans to go about creating magic within the confines of a car and speaking to Indulge, he revealed more details about the integration of Dolby Atmos in cars.

Andreas Ehret began by stating that Dolby looked into possibilities present in the automotive business a few years ago. "We looked at how the Dolby Atmos technology match the automotive industry. The idea of creating a new type of music listening experience, where you have music all around you, where the listener sits in the middle and listens to music in a new way, that idea has been worked on with the likes of big labels," he said.

Dolby figured that in entertainment use cases in a car, music came out on top and Andreas claimed that now is the time for the firm to get to business. "Music streaming is established and people are streaming music to their phones all the time. Since large names have embraced Dolby Atmos, there's a large content library available, which is delivered to phones today, to the living room and now my job is to take this technology and deliver it also into cars. For the past three years, we've been working on the supply chain, how acoustics work in the car, etc.," he  said.

But the road was not smooth as one would imagine. "Three years ago, we didn't understand much about cabin acoustics and we started from the ground up. We understand what it means to listen to good audio on the go. When it comes to cabin acoustics, there's a lot of dependency on cabin size. We had to think about space, proximity, etc," he explained.

"But there are good things, as in, we know exactly where people are placed. We know where the speakers are located and that will not change. What that means, when you measure the car and the different seating locations, then you can fine-tune and optimise the audio experience for each car cabin. That's independent of the car's size," he added.

When asked what is the ideal size of a car for one to experience the full Dolby Atmos experience, Andreas said, "The larger the cabin is (think three-seater cars), it is probably also good to have enough speakers around you to make sure you can balance the energy accurately. We sit down with the OEM for every car cabin, every trim level and with their suppliers as well. We do lots of tuning work to ensure that the music reproduction in the car is as good as it can be."

Having currently only announced its partnership with Mahindra in India, Dolby is silently working behind closed doors to expand the list. Globally though, the company has announced partnerships with 10 car brands, including Mercedes-Benz and Volvo.

Since most car companies have committed to reducing carbon emissions produced while making and by cars, electric vehicles are becoming more and more mainstream and Dolby has adopted its technology to those cars as well.

"There's no engine noise with EVs. Less engine noise offers you a better starting point. So, it works well in EVs. Practically speaking EVs are newer and when car manufacturers plan them, it is easier to also put new technology in EVs," Andreas stated.

Andreas was asked what the next big step is for Dolby Atmos and he said, "We are scaling across car brands and we are moving from high-end to more affordable cars. The next step is that there are other experiences that can use Dolby Atmos. Dolby Atmos came from cinema, so you obviously can also use it for audio and video streaming. The idea of saying, 'I have a cinema on wheels' that is happening  already and it will happen in India pretty soon."

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Finally, Andreas Ehret was asked what about India attracted the brand to India. He said, "India has a super dynamic society. There's lots of change happening. Here, data plans are incredibly affordable and therefore streaming is very affordable. That works for us as the advanced experiences we bring need to be streamed and for that we need to have a good data connection to deliver those to the consumers. Cars will have connectivity and by bringing those fresh and quickly evolving experiences, it seems like we can act very quickly here. For us, it is a great opportunity, as people are longing for content and experience and it is a young demographic. Also, India as a society is eager to catch up and be top notch."