Actually, the squashing of DVD-A is a LOT more sinister than most people realize.
To understand, you have to know the history of the DVD-A format. It was originally developed and patented by Meridian Audio. Meridian realized (or was strong-armed to realize) that they didn't have the marketing muscle to get the industry to go along. Meridian then signed a "deal" with Dolby for them to market DVD-A and also get a license to MLP (the underlying technology, Meridian Lossless Packaging). It isn't known if anyone at Meridian found a horse's head in their bed or not.
Dolby then, in the view of many, set out to kill the format. Dolby itself is almost a dead-letter now. Exhibitions that they used to take huge booth spaces (AES, CES, SMPTE) they now have no presence. Dolby after all is a company founded on "signal processing". As the bandwidth available now exceeds any conceivable uncompressed audio format, the reason for Dolby's existence has ended. Even in cinemas the new digital systems carry uncompressed AES PCM tracks.
Dolby is the black hand that killed off high-quality audio. A pity, really.
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?
Because as we know,
Dolby didn't kill off CDs (which hold 'higher quality' audio than AC3). And you can't blame the anemic market performance of DSD or SACD on
Dolby. And
Dolby itself now touts its high rez, lossless, multichannel-capable MLP-based compression audio for DolbyTrueHD on Blu-Ray discs. And I don't see from what you wrote how Dolby even killed off DVD-A specifically.
As for the history: Dolby first made its name in professional noise reduction and cinema sound -- not lossy compression. It migrated both of these to home audio. And some of its products remain pretty widespread today : for example, DPLII in some flavor is a feature of damn near every AVR marketed for the past decade or so. They're still making cinema products too. Wikipedia tells us "On June 18, 2010, Dolby introduced
Dolby Surround 7.1, and set up theaters worldwide with 7.1 surround speaker setups to deliver theatrical
7.1 surround sound. The first film to be released with this format was
Toy Story 3 which was later followed by 50 releases using the format."
Btw, a lot of my DVD-As -- and I've been buying them since they first appeared on the market -- have DTS tracks on them; that's an odd thing indeed if Dolby was or is in fact controlling the fate of DVD-A.
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.