Dolby Headphone is a technology developed by Lake Technologies (Australia), that later sold marketing rights to Dolby Laboratories Dolby Laboratories, 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:
Dolby Headphone is supported by various netbooks, including the Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2 and the Acer Aspire One. Asus 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.
Head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) are used to generate positional audio cues in the two channel output signal. A finite impulse response (FIR) filter is used to process the audio with lower latency.