Dolby Headphone is a technology developed by Lake Technologies (Australia), that later sold marketing rights to Dolby Laboratories Dolby Laboratories

Dolby Laboratories

Dolby Laboratories, Inc. , often shortened to Dolby Labs, is an American company specializing in audio noise reduction and audio encoding/compression.-History:...

, sometimes referred to as Mobile Surround, which creates a virtual surround sound environment in real-time using any set of two channel stereo headphones. It takes as input either a 5.1 channel signal, a Dolby Pro Logic II encoded 2 channel signal (from which 5 channels can be derived) or a stereo 2 channel signal. It sends as output a 2 channel stereo signal that includes audio cues intended to place the input channels in a simulated virtual soundstage.

Dolby Headphone is incorporated into the audio decoders packaged with surround headphones including:

• Astro Gaming A40 System
• Logitech G35
• Plantronics
  Plantronics
  Plantronics is an electronics company producing audio communications equipment for business and consumers. Its' products provide unified communications, mobile use, gaming and music...
  
   Gamecom 777 Headset
• Turtle Beach Systems
  Turtle Beach Systems
  Turtle Beach Systems is a sound card and headphone manufacturer and direct competitor with Creative Labs-branded Sound Blaster. In 1995, the company merged with Voyetra, a company that made custom software for sound cards, to form Voyetra Turtle Beach Inc which is headquartered in Elmsford, New...
  
   Ear Force X41
• Xbox Live
  Xbox Live
  Xbox Live is an online multiplayer gaming and digital media delivery service created and operated by Microsoft Corporation. It is currently the only online gaming service on consoles that charges users a fee to play multiplayer gaming. It was first made available to the Xbox system in 2002...
  
   Gaming Headset
• Tritton Technologies AX720 Gaming Headset
• Corsair HS1 USB Gaming Headset
• Sennheiser
  Sennheiser
  Sennheiser electronic GmbH & Co. KG is a private German audio company specializing in the design and production of a wide range of both consumer and high fidelity products, including microphones, headphones, telephony accessories, and avionics headsets for consumer, professional, and business...
  
   161 and 333D

Dolby Headphone is supported by various netbooks, including the Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2 and the Acer Aspire One. Asus

ASUS

ASUSTeK Computer Incorporated is a multinational computer technology and consumer electronics product manufacturer headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan. Its product range includes motherboards, desktops, laptops, monitors, tablet PCs, servers and mobile phones...

 Xonar soundcards also have Dolby Headphone support, including Asus Xonar models: D1, D2/PM, DX, D2X, DG, HDAV1, ST, STX, and Xense. PowerDVD Ultra 9 also supports Dolby Headphone when certain options are set in the "Settings" menu but PowerDVD is not marketed as an official product of Dolby Headphone.

Technology

Head-related transfer function

Head-related transfer function

A head-related transfer function is a response that characterizes how an ear receives a sound from a point in space; a pair of HRTFs for two ears can be used to synthesize a binaural sound that seems to come from a particular point in space. Some consumer home entertainment products designed to...

s (HRTFs) are used to generate positional audio cues in the two channel output signal. A finite impulse response

Finite impulse response

A finite impulse response filter is a type of a signal processing filter whose impulse response is of finite duration, because it settles to zero in finite time. This is in contrast to infinite impulse response filters, which have internal feedback and may continue to respond indefinitely...

(FIR) filter is used to process the audio with lower latency.