Dolby Digital, originally synonymous with Dolby AC-3 (see below), is the name for a family of audio compression technologies developed by Dolby Laboratories. Called Dolby Stereo Digital until 1995, it is lossy compression (except for Dolby TrueHD). The first use of Dolby Digital was to provide digital sound in cinemas from 35 mm film prints. It has since also been used for TV broadcast, radio broadcast via satellite, digital video streaming, DVDs, Blu-ray discs and game consoles.
Dolby Laboratories adapted the MDCT algorithm along with perceptual coding principles to develop the AC-3 audio format for cinema. The AC-3 format was released as the Dolby Digital standard in February 1991.[4][5] Dolby Digital was the earliest MDCT-based audio compression standard released, and was followed by others for home and portable usage, such as Sony's ATRAC (1992), the MP3 standard (1993) and AAC (1997).[6]
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^Britanak, V. (2011). "On Properties, Relations, and Simplified Implementation of Filter Banks in the Dolby Digital (Plus) AC-3 Audio Coding Standards". IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing. 19 (5): 1231–1241. doi:10.1109/TASL.2010.2087755. S2CID897622.