Andreas Ehret’s career is a journey through pivotal moments in audio history that I witnessed firsthand and wanted to hear about from his unique perspective. I was aware that we had crossed paths a few times when I requested this interview. During our conversation we could confirm our own different perspectives as Andreas was living it from within and, more importantly, having a key contributing role to that history, helping Dolby get where it is today.
A former researcher in audio coding, DSP, and algorithms at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS), Andreas Ehret joined Coding Technologies as technical lead, becoming Head of Development in 2007, when the German company was acquired by Dolby Laboratories. Since that time, Andreas Ehret has led licensing efforts for audio technologies from consumer to broadcast markets. In 2016, he moved from Germany to San Francisco, CA, when appointed VP of Consumer Entertainment Technology to manage all Dolby efforts worldwide, helping to expand Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby AC-4, and Dolby Atmos technologies at a critical point in Dolby’s expansion. Returning to Germany in 2019, he was placed in charge of Dolby’s automotive efforts and the Dolby Atmos Music experience in cars, which quickly became one of Dolby’s largest success stories.
At the spectacular Geely Uni3 Center, Sweden, where the AES automotive audio conference took place, Dolby’s surprising position in the fast-changing environment of in-car entertainment was on full display. Entertainment in cars is about to become one of Dolby’s largest segments, helping to consolidate Dolby Atmos definitely as a standard consumer experience.
“The Dolby entertainment ecosystem is growing across content and devices.” “The most popular, award-winning content today is produced in Dolby Vision and/or Dolby Atmos.” These are just a few of the headlines that Andreas Ehret used in his presentations where he explained that more than 80% of the Billboard top 100 songs are mixed and available in Dolby Atmos. And that Dolby experiences are already available in a growing number of cars around the world — during his presentation slides I’ve seen the names of car brands increase from 15 to 20, in just a few months.
J. Martins: How did your career in audio start?
Andreas Ehret: Back in the days, music was a passion for me. So, I played an instrument, but I was too bad to make a living from it. And I was good at math, so what could I do with that? I studied electrical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe, which also allowed me to specialize in sound, psychoacoustics, and signal processing. And then alongside my studies, I worked as a front of house engineer, in theaters, microphones, a little bit of mixing, and of course playing in a band and that kind of stuff.
After I completed my studies, I was looking for a job that would allow me to work in audio in some way or form, and I found Fraunhofer, which I thought it was a great place to be because they did something new, that no one really understood. There was this MPEG-1 layer three (MP3), thing, right? And back in those days, all your coding was like a new art form. I thought okay, well, that makes sense. Psychoacoustics, processing, FFTs, transforms. Yeah, it seems interesting. And I went for it!
Of course, it was a good time to be there because back then it was small. But it was the place to be because it was the moment in time where things happened in this world. We were involved in all the MPEG technology, and we worked on Advanced Audio Coding (AAC). We came across a small Swedish startup that did the spectral band replication technology that was a very efficient way how to code high frequencies. And that was the birth of Coding Technologies.
Yeah, when we figured that the stuff was not just a wild idea and it could actually work, we created a startup with 10 people in Nuremberg and five guys in Stockholm. That was in 2000, and fast forward, we brought that technology into MPEG, and into 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project, combining all protocols and standards used for mobile telecommunications. Coding Technologies’ MPEG-2 AAC-derived codec, called aacPlus, was published in 2001 and submitted to the MPEG for standardization. The codec would become the MPEG-4 High-Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) profile in 2003).
AE: Yeah, it was like the golden times in a way. And we went through all the startup stuff. Eventually in 2007, we were mature enough to start being profitable as a company and we were making advancements in the technology being adopted in broadcast. And that was the moment where Dolby said, “Hey, they do useful stuff. They have good technology.” And then we had an acquisition.
A very friendly acquisition in that sense, because we found that the DNA of the people and the technology matched very well. I think it was maybe the most successful acquisition Dolby ever had because the value of the IP proved to be paying off and a large share of the people are still with Dolby. Lots of colleagues are still around.
JM: Those are the roots of today’s Dolby Germany team?
AE: Exactly. Suddenly there was a new entity for Dolby. Because the construct is, if you have employees in Germany, they need to be employed by a German company. And that’s why Dolby Germany GmbH was founded. From there, my personal career was within Dolby. Back in the days of Coding Technologies, I was a technical lead, CTO kind of guy. At Dolby, I was offered a position as VP of engineering. I think people just trusted me and thought it would be good that someone outside of Dolby, with a fresh view, could help the company accelerate, be quicker, more efficient, and bring a new perspective. And I said, all right, I’ll try those big shoes.
Working as a VP of engineering with a global responsibility within Dolby, you can’t easily do that from Germany, or at least not for an extended time. I needed to know the company from inside out. So, I moved to the San Francisco headquarters.
I eventually moved back to Germany as our kids grew older, but I continued with my global role. And in different engineering capacity roles, I lead teams globally mostly in the consumer space. With technologies such as Dolby Digital Plus, AC4 as a codec, but then Dolby Atmos, and how do you bring that to set-top-boxes, to soundbars, to TVs, and all these kinds of things.
JM: Even if you were on the consumer front, it was that connection between Dolby and the movie industry that eventually enabled the expansion...
AE: Exactly. I mean, that’s a model that I think has served Dolby well over the years. That’s like a pattern. You first go to the professional space. Even before the cinema, with the tape machine, A, B type noise reduction... When the Dolby logo was showing in the cassettes and tape decks. With that same pattern, we brought surround sound to the cinema and then to home theater. And then brought it to the shiny disk, which paid the bills for a long time.
Around the time when I joined Dolby there was already a realization that shiny disks were only going to last for so long, right? So those were interesting times because the company reinvented itself to become an “experience company.” Not because of a codec or a technology but providing value because we can create experiences. That was a reinvention of the company.
Dolby Atmos was probably the first incarnation of that. It started in the labs around 2009, and in 2012, as the first movie was distributed, it became clear that the world was moving to streaming, and that another broadcast standard would not mean the world anymore. They’re still relevant, of course. But everything’s digital, the shiny discs were going away, and there were more options to bring an experience to the homes.
We understood we could bring a valuable new experience and that was the driving factor for Dolby Atmos. The whole notion of saying, “OK, how can we improve the cinema experience? What can we do? How can we go beyond traditional channel-based sound and go all object-based?” The notion of pan through arrays and all those things, were then created in service of the experience. At the end of the day, it’s all about the experience.
AE: Yes. I mean, that’s, I think, why we are unique. Because we understand how content is created. We understand the famous “artist’s intent” thing, right? And Hollywood, movies, all that is one big space we’re coming from. But we also understand very well what is it that broadcasters need, and the distribution part. How do you go from a live venue to an OB truck? What happens in an OB truck? And yeah, then music came into play...
JM: That’s an interesting part of your career, because between the introduction of Dolby Atmos for cinema sound, the broadcast, and streaming services, Dolby Atmos became a consumer-facing business. Before music, Dolby was trying to get into the mobile space. I still remember that Dolby was trying different things on smartphones, but they were not called Dolby Atmos. And one day... everything was Dolby Atmos. So Atmos became a brand, more than a format.
AE: Exactly. Dolby Atmos is a branding for the experience. Immersive sound is the flavor. When you see Dolby Atmos content, really what it means is that it has been produced, created in a Dolby Atmos mixing room, and it’s been delivered digitally to a device, and that device understands it and can reproduce it and recreate the Atmos experience.
That’s one of the things I keep explaining... Dolby Atmos is not an effect. It’s not an algorithm. Dolby Atmos is this end-to-end chain from the creation, distribution, and playback. It’s the whole chain. And that’s the experience that we’re branding, yes.
JM: There were some acquisitions in there as well, such as the company from Barcelona, IMM Sound. Were you involved?
AE: Not directly. I mean, I played a bit of a role in having some of the interviews and also bringing them on board... Because they had a similar journey to mine, I was involved in that. Less in the decision as such. I mean, back in those days, it was mostly about cinema sound, and I was more on the consumer side of things.
But yeah. They had similar ideas, and we loved their ideas, their technology, their approach. In a sense the acquisition was to avoid letting the market being confused.
JM: When you tried to bring Dolby’s technologies to the consumer space it was for home theater, TVs, and smartphones. When did you see the opportunity for the automotive space?
AE: I think it’s very much related to music. So, when we think about the whole story, music was a big step. Because, you know, we had Atmos for cinema, then Atmos to the home, then Atmos to other devices, soundbars, blah, blah... That’s now all clear. But that was Atmos for audiovisual content. Movies, TV series, what have you.
JM: Even though the real IP is on the encoding side?
AE: Well, there’s IP in all pieces...
JM: That process has not ended. It’s still ongoing... That’s why we see a lot of amazing work being done in spatial audio and a lot of stuff where there is no intent. It’s just remixing.... Anyway, we could talk for hours about the creative intent of spatial audio music. But then we have automotive as a new environment, a new platform. And there was this big boost with Apple Music and the availability of spatial audio and people getting familiar with the process on binaural...
AE: Exactly. Yeah, things were sort of coming together. For us, understanding music production workflows, working with the labels, Universal, Warner, and the artists was a big win. And then, of course, we thought about, OK, where does this content make sense? Does it make sense for automotive now? Music in a car is obviously the number one entertainment use case. And it’s a beautiful environment because of the defined seating positions... and speakers around you. It’s your own space. So you can crank up the volume and just enjoy it. In that sense, after the studio, it’s probably the second best environment for music.
JM: Yes. But meanwhile, Apple used spatial audio to boost Apple Music as a streaming service, to differentiate. And effectively, Apple went all in with Dolby Atmos. Why was that?
AE: I think there’s probably two reasons for that. One is, of course, because we have a great standing relationship with Apple. Apple has been using Dolby technology for a long time, right? We have been partners in Apple TV, and many other products. We had a relationship already. And they saw the value in the way we were doing things.
And then the second probably has to do with the content industry. Because the content industry also has to hedge their bets, right? Who do they play with? Who do they trust? We were doing a good job for the likes of Universal and Warner. We treated them seriously. We were listening to their demands and requests. They asked us “how do I calibrate my studio? How do I make sure that when I mix in Capitol Records or in Abbey Road, it’s consistent? Do you have tools? Our mixers really don’t like this. Can you do something else? Can you help us?”
We were in deep. We were listening to them. We tried to understand what they needed, their workflows, how to do a master, how to do archiving. So yes, the content industry was the other reason since they’re embracing the format. Apple could just pick that content knowing that, if you do this, there’s no need to convince the content industry to do something else.
JM: When you’re talking about distribution of Dolby Atmos, there was a big jump between just having a multichannel format approach and the metadata concept. That was a big evolution and completely changed the mindset. What is the source of that? There was already a lot of discussions about virtual reality, 3D sound... Even Fraunhofer had a lot of research in that area, but it was all loose. And suddenly Dolby was ahead in that regard. Where does that come from?
AE: So, it wasn’t me personally, right? (Laughs) But I have witnessed what the guys did. I was there and I could see what the thought process was. And it was really this thing of saying, “Oh, what is the next step in the evolution?”
Again, it was driven or invented really from the cinema perspective. We had stereo, we had 5.1, we had 7.1. So, what’s next? Is it 9.1? Is it 22.2? Is it just more and more and more and more? And that was the moment where people said, let’s rethink this and they came up with this paradigm shift.
And the paradigm shift was to say, oh, we shouldn’t be mixing to a preconceived channel configuration because that’s not flexible, right? There are real issues because each cinema space is different, so you always have setups of speakers in the room, and you have to adapt for it. Even for 5.1 that’s hard.
Channel format is hard, and it has limitations, right? If you pan through with a 5.1 system, the sound jumps. If you have the famous helicopter, it jumps! It’s not a smooth thing.
So, the experience is not realistic. That’s not how we hear. We’re not supposed to hear in a channel-based format, right?
And the real world consists of sound objects, things that emanate sound. A lot of sound objects, coming from different spaces, and they’re moving. And it’s three-dimensional and not in a plane. That’s what drove that idea of thinking about “how can we produce and mix sources into space rather than into a preconceived channel format?” And that was the fundamental paradigm shift.
JM: So, my question is actually which one came first? Taking Dolby Atmos to the automotive environment, or the content evolution toward music?
AE: I think we did a bit of tinkering with automotive. But we didn’t have suitable content. Movies in the car were not feasible. And at that time, we also realized that, yeah, Atmos can also be used for music. But where does it add value?
Here I can actually say that, within the company, I was probably one of the first ones to drive that and do experiments. I mean, in my very early days at Coding, I also came across the Auro guys and I experimented with that. I liked the idea of height, and how height production does something for music. There’s some additional emotions that you can evoke, right?
So, we tried it for Atmos music, and we did some test recordings in Germany. Surely it was also happening in other parts of the company, because it was a rising topic.
A very interesting moment I had was with Kraftwerk. They were looking at re-releasing all their albums, and they wanted to create live shows and put all the visuals and music on Blu-ray. I got in touch with Fritz Hilpert, who was their main engineer, and he had come across this “Atmos thing”: “You’re doing that for movies. And we think of our music and this production as “a concert movie,” because we want to bring our “video art” and the music together and bring that as a movie.”
Here was an artist asking for innovation, asking us if we could do this. For me this was heaven, right? And it was also emotional, because I grew up with Kraftwerk when I was a kid.
So, we went full in. We helped put things together with early cinema tools, into a home theater, and tested and tried all things for music. And then a first product — this Kraftwerk Blu-Ray — was born. At the same time, music was actually a rising topic in the company, especially for business developers and market developers.
I was VP of engineering, and I tried to bring this forward. We really engaged with the music industry. We really tried to understand the business and how to work in Pro Tools, and Logic, and others. What’s the music workflow? What’s the mixing workflow? We had the right people doing that and we established partnerships, and of course we engaged with the labels and the music industry.
JM: A lot of people would comment that the music industry was also anxious to have another opportunity to resell their existing catalog. With the demise of physical media, and downloads being replaced by streaming... That was a big motivation.
AE: I bet that’s one of the reasons, yes. But of course, another one is that the experience is so amazing, right? We couldn’t do that if there’s not value. Yes, of course we can re-release, but we could also bring a new experience to life. Then, yeah, it was also a lot of work to get from a cinema workflow to music. There’s suddenly new things. How do we think about an effect bus? How about reverb? How about delays and tap delays and a panner that is aligned with tempo, and all those things. It’s complicated. No, I don’t need stems in the same way, right? It’s different. Everything is a very different workflow—a very artistically different process.
JM: So, everything was converging. But how do you bring Dolby Atmos to the car so quickly in such a complex environment? There are so many levels... You have to deal with so many players.
AE: Again, we started a few years ago, prior to the pandemic.
I was tired of managing a large-scale engineering organization and I decided to give back my VP title. At that time, I looked around the company and what I had a passion for, and I saw the opportunity to bring Atmos music to the automotive space. An expansion of our market, right?
The car is where most music can really shine. Cars was also a new market for us, and we could bring something new. I said, okay, I want to try this. So, I was kind of the employee number one of the automotive business unit. I teamed up with my good buddy, Patrick (Rossi), in San Francisco, which is a bit more on the commercial side and he was like, “oh, let’s dive in!”
Then the story was around exactly to your point. It’s a complex environment. But do you know when the stars align? Yeah. I think I was probably the right person at the right time because I had a technical background, and I had the business acumen. And I love to figure out things with customers. So I went to customers that I knew, from the automotive space, and a few guys I knew in that space, some of them back from when we started together in Karlsruhe. Some ended up at what is now DSP Concepts. So, I went to DSP Concepts, and I talked to Cinemo, and Harman... I understood they were an important part of the supply chain and they were all close by, in Germany. And I got in touch with automotive OEMs, to understand how this all fits together. And then we started bringing in system architects and technology people and develop the business.
JM: So you’ve hired people from the automotive industry?
AE: Yes. Well, it’s a mix. Of course, we had good audio people within Dolby who understood the space, but we also brought in some external talent. And then we figured it out. Software, middleware, head units, versus amps and speakers. How do we do that? What should the deliverable look like? What’s the entry point? How do we tune the whole concept, and how do we work with cabin tuners? And then we built our own demo cars and learned how to tune the cars ourselves. So, we became experts.
Today, we’re working with the industry to provide our perspective on what an Atmos experience in a car should sound like. They know exactly how automotive car audio works, but Atmos is a little different.
AE: Exactly. Well, that’s the beauty of it, right? The partners understand we’re bringing value. And audio is more valuable in the car. People understand that. If you have a better experience and you’re bringing better content, that helps everyone. It helps the car audio industry. Consumers see the value in better speakers because there’s higher value content. There’s value in creating those experiences.
JM: And suddenly, in a car designed for immersive, for Dolby Atmos, I can use that same speaker system for many other audio features. How is Dolby looking at that?
AE: Of course we’re looking at that. We’re having a broader perspective and thinking about what could be an evolution or what could even be a revolution. We always want to innovate and think about what other problems are there to solve, right? What other experience could we bring? We may take a decision to say, OK, we’re not going to do this or that. For example, we purposefully are saying we’re not going to design speakers or provide an upmixer (converting stereo to immersive). Because there’s so many upmixers already. So why should we do it? The world probably doesn’t need yet another one.
Where are we the real experts? Where’s the real value we provide? And it’s probably not in speaker design.
But of course, we’re working with the speaker designers to have interesting designs that are relevant to us. Such as a shallow speaker for the headrest that could go down to 150Hz. Things like that. I’m trying to influence speaker designers to have Dolby Atmos in mind. I mean, traditionally they put speakers in doors, or in certain spaces. Well, if you’re early in the design process of course you can have better locations to put the speakers. Thinking about, how can I have a great experience that I can also scale? Can I have a great Atmos experience with less speakers? Things like that are definitely in the road map. And we’re also bridging the visual space since screens are becoming available.
China is super interesting as a market and the bigger use case there is actually video. Video streaming to cars in China is a big thing. Having a private space with a great audiovisual system—a great screen and great audio—allows enjoying a movie in the car and not in the living room. And they do that.
JM: Do you have a well-established roadmap of how the developers, the sound designers can approach Dolby Atmos in a car? Is that now well-defined on your side?
AE: I believe so. Yes. Of course, there’s always a lot of challenges and work to do. But generally speaking, I think we are broadly well understood in the industry. And I think that goes across also regions. China is a big market for us, and things work a little differently there. We’re working with the cabin tuners in China, Korea, Japan, Europe, US, you name it. And I think we’re also working constructively and positively and in a collaborative manner with nearly everyone in the supply chain. Be it the Tier 1s or the head unit suppliers or the amp or speaker suppliers. I think we have a good relationship because again, we bring value. And that’s value to everyone.
Resources
“Behind the scenes: Dolby’s acquisition of Coding Technologies,” BDTi, December 19, 2007, www.bdti.com/InsideDSP/2007/12/19/Dolby
Dolby Atmos for Cars, Dolby Professional, https://professional.dolby.com/music/dolby-atmos-for-cars
“Dolby Atmos Now Installed in Over 2,000 Screens and 500 Movie Titles Released,” audioXpress website, December 8, 2016,
Dolby Professional, https://professional.dolby.com
M. Lutzky (Head of Audio for Communications, Fraunhofer IIS, Audio and Media Technologies Division), “Communications: Enabling High-Quality Voice Conferencing,” audioXpress, October 2020,
J. Martins and R. Shively, “5th International AES Conference on Automotive Audio,” audioXpress, October 2024.
R. Shively, “AES 2022 Automotive Audio International Conference,” audioXpress, September 2022.
Object-Based Audio
The Dolby trajectory is extraordinary, but more remarkable are the company’s technology contributions. Since its founding in 1965, Dolby Laboratories has been a leader in developing innovative audio and video signal processing technologies. Dolby’s beginnings in analog sound recording and reproduction expanded to cinema, through broadcast, streaming, and across a wide spectrum of consumer products today.
One of the pivotal moments in Dolby’s history that I witnessed was when Dolby acquired Spanish company IMM Sound, the same year of the premiere of the first movie to use Dolby Atmos technology (Disney-Pixar’s “Brave”) in 2012. The Barcelona-based company was having a pivotal role in bringing awareness to the possibilities of immersive audio sound in cinemas and successfully promoted the concept of 3D spatialization without relying on traditional audio channels. Focusing on the spatial properties of sound elements, allowed for more flexibility in speaker layout and ensured consistent sound quality regardless of the setup.
Dolby Atmos was precisely based on a combination of multichannel sound combined with sound objects and already offered a clear path for the industry to embrace immersive audio. And using descriptive metadata about how the audio should be played back, Dolby Atmos could faithfully generate legacy 5.1 - and 7.1-channel mixes automatically, thus saving valuable time during postproduction.
Dolby Atmos was promoted at CinemaCon 2012, in Las Vegas, NV, as a more natural and realistic soundfield using that hybrid approach to mixing dynamic objects that envelop the listener. With the ability to transmit up to 128 simultaneous and lossless audio inputs (channels or objects), and the ability to render from 5.1 all the way up to 64 discrete speaker feeds, Dolby Atmos introduced a completely new audio capability for exhibitors.
This concept conceived for cinema also enables adaptive rendering to ensure that the playback experience is as close as possible to the creator’s original vision in any given environment. This inherent scalability and adaptability meant that Dolby Atmos could quickly expand to physical media (Blu-Ray), broadcast and the exciting new world of consumer digital media, streaming and mobile. And Dolby quickly understood the need to engage with content creators to perfect the required object–based mixing production tools and fulfill the promise of a new level of creative control to sound designers. That Dolby Atmos would benefit from the age of streaming media and make a bold transition to music, is something that was not exactly in the cards, but reflects well the work conducted at Dolby and its extensive strategic partnerships.
Precisely at the AES Automotive Conference in Gothenburg, Dolby announced Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos in Apple CarPlay. With strong support from Apple and multiple streaming services now embracing it, Spatial Audio is basically now a moniker for Dolby Atmos. By integrating Spatial Audio into vehicles, drivers were placed at the center of an immersive soundscape that allows them to feel music in a whole new way. The automotive audio experience is even transcending our still-young perception of the potential of multichannel audio technology, with Dolby Atmos content now at the heart.
With the adoption of electric vehicles, and emerging autonomous driving capabilities, the automotive industry is in the midst of a significant evolution and changing consumer preferences where in-car entertainment is a growing focus area for manufacturers.
This article was originally published in audioXpress, November 2024
