Linear Acoustic, specialists in loudness control and upmixing solutions, was at the 2009 SMPTE Conference and Exhibition in Sydney, Australia last week. As Australia prepares to roll out DTV nationwide in 2010, Linear Acoustic showcased its flagship AERO.air (5.1) transmission loudness manager and LAMBDA digital audio and metadata monitor designed to manage DTV loudness control issues from end-to-end.
Christina Carroll, Linear Acoustic VP of sales and marketing, notes that Australia’s coming transmission change “will bring a whole new set of DTV audio challenges as broadcasters work to improve the listener experience. Linear Acoustic loudness control products have been used worldwide to mitigate these very concerns.”
Products featured include its third-generation AERO.air (5.1), a 10-channel transmission loudness manager with built-in Dolby Digital AC-3 encoding and the ability to deliver 5.1 channel surround sound from a stereo source while maintaining balanced signal levels between all broadcast programming. Thus, one simple, easy-to-use unit can handle complete audio processing and encoding for local, network and EAS broadcasting. Incorporating an HD/SD-SDI input, this solution also provides dynamics processing to allow seamless integration of local two-channel audio and network 5.1 audio.
The Linear Acoustic LAMBDA is a digital audio and metadata monitor that can accept and decode both Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby Digital AC-3 directly from an applied DVB-ASI transport stream. It displays and reproduces up to 16 audio channels from AES or embedded HD/SD-SDI input. The LAMBDA system also accepts audio metadata via a nine-pin serial input or extracts it from the VANC space of an applied HD-SDI input. Audio and metadata are displayed in combination to allow for accurate monitoring.