Not everybody wants a bunch of speakers in the living room, and to make matters worse, a traditional surround sound system requires them to live in specific places. Center speakers go above or below the TV, fronts to either size and rears at the back corners of the room. But what if there’s a doorway or open space right where a speaker should go? Dolby will soon have an app for that.
The audio company demonstrated a speaker setup system at CES 2024 called Dolby Atmos Flex Connect, and I was able to experience it myself at the company’s private demo suite. A TV at the front of the room joined three speakers placed seemingly at random, one on a bookshelf to my left and two more to my right. Dolby’s representatives handed me a phone with the demo app queued up and I hit the “I am where I normally watch the TV” button to start the calibration process.
Following a series of simple prompts I measured first the TV’s speakers then the other speakers by simply aiming the phone at them in turn. The phone’s mic listened to the sound from the speakers then entered a calibration mode for a few seconds. After the process finished, the message “Calibration complete!” appeared on the TV and phone along with a graphic depicting the location of the speakers in the room, and I was able to listen.
The results were impressive. Yes, I could still sort of detect the location of the speakers by listening hard, but for the most part their locations blended into a single field of sound. I appreciated that the side of the room with two speakers didn’t sound massively different from the side with one, and the low-quality TV speakers blended in nicely with the other speaker set.
