Dolby's New Atmos System Lets You Place Speakers Anywhere in the Room

Speaker 1: Hey everybody. You know how surround sound speakers have to be put in a particular place. Well, Dolby has a solution. They're calling it Dolby Atmos Flex Connect. The idea is you can kind of place your surround speakers anywhere in the room. So I just got a demo here of the technology with Dolby and it's sounded really good. Lemme tell you how it works. So first of all, there's a television and it's all based on the tv. You can also connect speakers around the room and they can plug in wherever. And instead of placing them [00:00:30] to either side of the TV and in particular parts in the back of the room, you can kind of place them where they naturally should be placed. For example, not to block a door or something like that. And when it comes time to set up the speakers, you have a little phone app. Speaker 1: You can pick it up, aim it at the television, and it will actually listen using your phone's mic to what the speaker is putting out, whether it's on the television or these speakers placed around the room. So after that, relatively quick calibration process. I got to say, super simple. [00:01:00] When you're setting up an AV receiver, something like that, the calibration process use a sound pressure meter can be pretty complicated. This was really simple in my experience. After that process is over, you have a pretty decent Atmos surround sound system. Now in my listening, I got the full surround effect. It didn't feel like anything was too loud or too quiet for my position on the couch. And at the end of the day, it also calibrates for the particular capabilities of the speaker. So for example, on a tv, we all know those speakers can be pretty thin sounding. Speaker 1: They don't [00:01:30] have great base response. So the system is designed to compensate for better or worse speakers around the room. So it's actually going to be available this year in high-end TVs from TCL and High Sense, and that will work completely discreetly using the microphones built into the tv. But what Dolby's showing us here is something that's designed to trickle down to less expensive televisions. And you can imagine a manufacturer of a TV selling speakers alongside it that can work with this whole system, or sometimes maybe even a third party if they want to make those [00:02:00] speakers compatible. Working with the system as well, because again, it's all based on the phone app and working with Dolby system. So pretty cool technology for, again, making that Dolby Atmos experience sound better regardless of where you're placing the speakers. That's a look at Dolby Atmos Flex Connect. If you want more information, check it out on cnet.