This time it's about height channels. Dolby, Audyssey, Yamaha and more already delivered matrix decoding and DSP effects that make use of height channels. More or less successful, since it is a matter of boiling soup on a nail that basically has little or no altitude information.

But in the world of cinema there has already been two audio formats with true height information. We're talking about Auro-3D and Dolby Atmos. None of these formats has until very recently been available for the home market. Note that I am deliberately avoiding the term home theater market, since the first recordings in Audo-3D on Blu-ray allready exist, and it is pure music recordings from 2L in the format Pure Audio Blu-ray!

For a while it seemed that the Auro 3D should be leading the domestic market. They have been quite active in promoting the past year, not least at CES in Vegas. And they have also been the first to launch the Hardware that supports this format. The catch has been that we are talking about quite narrow products in very high price range. The first was Datasat RS20i , one HighEnd processor that has not been available on the Norwegian market.

There has recently been a scaled-down model - Datasat RS10. In addition, Auro even produced a receiver for the domestic market, with the name AUGIRA . Also this has a relatively high price range.

It looked for a while that Dolby would not be so active in this format battle. But now they have suddenly emerged as trolls of box, and within a few days there are launched surround receivers in the mainstream segment from both Denon and Onkyo. We are of course above the budget class here, but still at moderate price ranges.

Dolby Atmos has up to four height channels, but you may as for Auro-3D adjust configurations where there are only two height speakers. However, Dolby Atmos` home version of Atmos mis the central height channel Auro-3D can be supplied with - the so-called "The Voice of God." It is also interesting to note that systems with Dolby Atmos often are defined as such: 7.2.4, where the last number is the number of height channels. This as an alternative to 11.2, as one might expect.

Onkyo has just announced two models with Dolby Atmos. There is talk of the models TX-NR1030 and TX-NR3030. You can read more about these models here.

Also Denon has come with prelaunch of three new models with Dolby Atmos. We're talking about X4100W AVR, AVR-X5200W and top model AVR-X7200W. Read more about the upcoming Receiver Denon models here.

Auro 3D

You can watch a video about Auro-3D, where the CEO of Auro Technologies, Wilfried Van Baelen explains more about Auro-3D.

Read more in Auro-3D at Auro technologies .

Dolby Atmos.

Onkyo has made this video about Dolby Atmos:

Read more about Dolby Atmos with Dolby