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New Products Add Multiple Dolby Technologies

Las Vegas
– Dolby technologies of various stripes will appear in multiple new products
here at International CES, where Sony announced plans to offer its first A/V
receivers (AVRs) with Dolby Pro Logic IIz and Motorola announced plans to
incorporate volume-leveling Dolby Volume technology in a line of cable-TV set-top
boxes.

In AVRs, Pro Logic IIz
post-processing technology adds a pair of front-height channels to 5.1- and
7.1-channel surround systems.

In cable boxes, Dolby Volume maintains
a consistent perceived volume level when channels are changed and a TV program
transitions to a commercial. Dolby Volume also dynamically and automatically
compensates for the human ear’s lower sensitivity to bass and treble sounds as
volume levels decrease, ensuring that low- and high-frequency sounds are
audible when a program’s volume is automatically lowered to a user’s preset listening
level, Dolby said.

Dolby Volume already appears in
audio products from ARCAM, Harmon Kardon, Sherwood, Bryston, Emotiva,
Parasound, Onkyo and Integra. In these products, Dolby Volume also controls volume
levels when switching among connected sources, such as Blu-ray players and
cable boxes. In TVs, Toshiba added Dolby Volume to TVs last year and added the
techno logy to its new Toshiba REGZA series LCD televisions here at CES.

In cable boxes, Dolby
Volume will appear in Motorola’s DCX
family of set-top boxes for the North American and Latin American markets. The
currently available DCX3400 HD-DVR
and DCX3200 HD can be updated with
Dolby Volume by cable operators. The DCX700
and DCX3300 HD set-tops will ship
with Dolby Volume included. Consumers would turn on Dolby Volume through the
settings menu of the DCX set-tops.

In other Dolby news, Sony
announced plans to launch its first AVRs with Dolby Pro Logic IIz, joining AVRs
from such companies as Denon, Integra, Marantz and Onkyo.

In other product launches, multiple new PCs, laptops and netbooks
are launching with version 3 of the company’s Dolby Home Theater suite of
technologies, Dolby said. The Dolby Home Theater suite of technologies has been
used previously by Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Sony, Lenovo and Acer. The Home
Theater suite consists of Audio
Optimization, High-Frequency Enhancer, Natural Bass, Dolby Headphone, Sound
Space Expander, Dolby Pro Logic IIx and Dolby Digital Live, which converts
soundtracks to Dolby Digital in real time for playback through connected CE
devices.

Here at CES, new
products launching with Dolby Home Theater v.3 include Sony’s new F-series
Vaio laptops and Lenovo’s latest Ideapad laptops. Medion is also showcasing new
PCs with Dolby Home Theater v.3, including the Medion Touch all-in-one desktop
PC.

The Dolby booth also features Acer and Lenovo netbooks with Dolby
Headphone to deliver surround sound through any pair of headphones.

Dolby is also highlighting Dolby Axon, a voice communication
client for PCs. It improves voice clarity and surround sound for online gaming.

Dolby Digital Plus,
the multichannel surround technology that’s more efficient than Dolby Digital,
is being carried over by such TV companies as Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and Sanyo for over-the-air broadcasts, Dolby
said. But the technology is also appearing in these companies’ new TVs to
support the Vudu streaming video service, Dolby said.

In Blu-ray, the company announced that more than 560 Blu-ray Disc
movie titles from 33 studios feature Dolby TrueHD, the multichannel
lossless-compression soundtrack technology.

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