Dolby Digital, formerly known as AC-3, is a digital audio compression format. Dolby Digital takes advantage of how the human ear processes sound. When coding noise is close to the frequency of an audio signal, that audio signal masks the noise so that the human ear hears only the intended audio signal.
Dolby Digital is used with digital versatile discs (DVDs), in North America only. European DVD's use MPEG audio instead.
Dolby Digital provides five full-bandwidth channels, front left, front right, center, surround left, and surround right, for true surround sound quality. A low frequency effect (LFE) channel is included that provides the sound needed for special effects and action sequences in movies. The LFE channel is one-tenth of the bandwidth of the other channels and is sometimes erroneously called the subwoofer channel. This multichannel scheme is known as 5.1 channel.
