My guess is this is the truth. Microsoft just said see ya later to CES. Dolby is not in the battle they were with DTS when every year they even battled for the greatest party. I would get to meet Al Schmidt, Elliot Schenier, Ed Cherney, David Tickle, Robert Margouleff all at one party. The band would be a DTS band like The Mavericks. One year i watched as Edgar Winters, Alan Parsons, and Jeff Skunk Baxter took off to finish off the evening. That was quite a sight, for many reasons. These parties rented out whole restaurants like the Harley Davidson themed joint. This was when they battled for space on the disc, with blu the battle is over. The battle is now to stay relevant.
But is it true? Did Bob Stuart or some other informed insider tell you this? How exactly did Dolby go about killing off high quality audio?
As for the company's absence at AES etc....the economy's been kinda troubled for the past few years, to put it mildly. A lot of companies have 'downsized' their convention presence. Dolby may well be hurting along with the others. And perusing the stock charts I see Dolby got killed this year in the market by the announcement that Microsoft might not include Dolby's DVD/Blu-ray playback codecs in Windows 8. That would be a huge licensing revenue loss for Dolby. To make it up, Dolby is going to have to try to license its tech to the computer hardware side, e.g., Dell, HP etc.