Dolby Volume - Does it really work and would I use it?
Posted by Henry Choy on June 2nd 2008 | Discuss
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Small Dolby Volume Unit.
I’ve seen and heard more product demonstrations than I care to count. In spite of that when I heard the Dolby Volume demo at this year’s CES at Cirrus Logic’s suite, I was hopeful. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told my kids to turn down the TV volume. It turns out TV broadcast volume levels are not the same from channel to channel or even from show to commercial.
While seeing the demo at CES I couldn’t play around with the set up in a non-controlled environment, nonetheless, I was very curious about it. I told the Cirrus folks at the time that I would love to take the unit for a test drive. Recently I finally got the chance. David Grant, Senior Product Marketing Manager from Cirrus Logic gave me an early prototype unit at our IDTV conference in Taiwan a couple of weeks ago.
The unit is small, with two left-right RCA input jacks on one edge, and two output jacks on the opposite edge, plus a power supply connector with a power switch.
I was actually excited about giving this a test. Teenagers never listen to their parents, so anything that will decrease the things I have to tell my teenagers is something I’m happy to test. The setup was easy. I don’t have a set top box or DVR so I had to connect the TV’s audio output to the input on the little white box. I got another set of AV wires and connected them from the output of the box to the AV receiver. There was no complex setup to run, no menus to walk through, and no CD of drivers to load—the hardest part was finding an extra AV wire for the output.
I left the unit connected for several days and there were two things I noticed. I didn’t reach for the remote and I didn’t have to tell my kids to turn down the TV as many times. The unit did what it advertised to do. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty darn good.
There were three things that I noticed in this real world use of the unit. Some of the speaking seemed a bit muted at times, there was a slight delay to reach the adjusted volume, and the volume showed a slight difference in certain scene changes. I also completed on/off comparison using the demo DVD that Cirrus sent me. I put that into my DVD player and tried out various scenes from their demo disk. The video clips show the difference between turning on and off the unit to do a side by side comparison better than the real world example. This is just what I would have expected. Controlled sources should show off the technology best. There were also some music scenes. The symphony scene is one where I liked it better without the Dolby Volume. Soft passages should be soft and loud passages should be loud. Dolby volume boosted the low passages and clipped the louder passages. For that kind of a performance, I want to hear the pieces as the conductor envisions the work of art.
It’s not perfect but it does greatly reduce the amount of volume level tweaking that our family goes through as we watch TV. I would leave it on most times. For music programs, I would painfully crawl behind my TV and turn it off. Probably a remote power control needs to be added, but I can do that.
Cirrus is selling the chips that go inside the box. They are trying to convince people to build these little boxes. Also, they are trying to get the TV, AV receiver, etc.. manufacturers to put them in as well.
