I’m not an expert on this by any means, but I think the issue is they would have to work out how to encode the audio for surround themselves, and then it would be up to all of the different AV receivers out there to decode it properly. Using Dolby just standardizes it to where if your receiver supports that format you know it’ll decode it properly.
Yes there are other formats such as DTS and Auro 3D. You can even do it with straight up LPCM if you want, but DD is one of the quickest ways to do it and iirc DTS has similar licensing requirements with their logo, and barely anyone has Auro. You could try to use LPCM but you’d need a multichannel output such as 6x analog connections or a digital source using bitstreamed output which many didn’t have at the time.
Can’t you add surround without dolby?
I’m not an expert on this by any means, but I think the issue is they would have to work out how to encode the audio for surround themselves, and then it would be up to all of the different AV receivers out there to decode it properly. Using Dolby just standardizes it to where if your receiver supports that format you know it’ll decode it properly.
Yes there are other formats such as DTS and Auro 3D. You can even do it with straight up LPCM if you want, but DD is one of the quickest ways to do it and iirc DTS has similar licensing requirements with their logo, and barely anyone has Auro. You could try to use LPCM but you’d need a multichannel output such as 6x analog connections or a digital source using bitstreamed output which many didn’t have at the time.