With a growing number of people consuming content on televisions, laptops, tablets and other mobile devices, Skywalker has been particularly interested in finding technology that helps preserve an immersive audience experience as content migrates to smaller screens. The format that is the most widely distributed around the world for consumption on these devices is the stereo mix, but with a regular stereo mix much of the sonic detail and spatialization is lost.
But thanks to a new technology created by tech start-up Ambidio and utilized by Skywalker Sound, devices that could previously offer only a simple stereo mix can now deliver the impression of a surround sound experience.
The enhanced mixes of the scenes below were created by Skywalker Sound using Ambidio’s proprietary algorithm, which allows any device with two speakers to reproduce the impression of the original surround sound mix. And because the Ambidio algorithm is encoded in the content when the stereo mix is mastered, users don’t need to download any apps or have any special playback system to experience it — they just hit play on their device as they normally would.
(Please note that this works best with two forward-facing external speakers; the effect won’t be discernible on single-speaker devices.)