Features
Broadcast Confab Is A Smash
By Steve Harvey
Oct 7, 2007, 00:29

At the request of television and radio professionals, a broadcast audio conference was established within the AES Convention this year for the first time, with remarkable success and excellent attendance. Chaired by David Bialik, the broadcast conference is presenting a comprehensive program exploring new innovations and techniques as the radio and television industries go through their respective digital revolutions.

Broadcast multichannel surround audio still enjoys a significant potential listening audience, as Robert Bleidt of Fraunhofer IDMT noted during the “Innovations in Digital Radio” panel discussion. Despite the prevalence of 5.1 systems in homes and cars across the country, the uptake of surround codecs from Fraunhofer, Neural Audio and others among radio broadcasters is relatively slow, and consumer interest continues to lag. As Dave Wilson of the Consumer Electronics Association pointed out, a recent survey reported that 85 percent of 12- to 24-year-olds would choose an MP3 player over radio as the preferred option for music.

Radio needs to look to the examples of YouTube and the iPod for salvation, says Wilson, allowing users to customize their experience, and create products that blend radio content with their own. If consumers listen to FM on an iPod maybe they would notice the difference in audio quality, mused Bialik.

Saturday’s workshop on “Surround Contribution for Radio and TV” offered case studies from several European broadcasters. Chair Jon McClintock of APT U.K. outlined the signal flow adopted by Austria’s ORTF before Heinz Peter Reykers of WDR presented an exhaustive look at the German broadcaster’s remote acquisition and transport over E1 lines.

Maintaining consistent loudness levels between differing content and program types was the subject of in-depth investigation during the “Loudness Workshop” on Saturday. Omnia’s Frank Foti observed that “loud doesn’t necessarily mean bad,” but it certainly leads to distortion, listening fatigue and, potentially, hearing damage. Foti noted the pros and cons of processing and noted, “Intermodulation distortion with clipping is not pretty.”

TC Electronic’s Thomas Lund offered a scheme that relies on the “center of gravity” of content to maintain loudness across all types of programming. Promoting the use of ITU-R BS.1770 loudness metering, Lund also noted some drawbacks with Dolby Labs’ solution, which relies on dialnorm measurements that take dialog levels as a reference, as over complex and expensive. “Dialog is rarely the only or dominant source,” he said.

Dolby’s Jeffrey Reidmiller noted that the FCC does mandate the use of dialnorm for DTV loudness in the U.S. Italy and Israel both legislate loudness, especially for commercial insertions, he added. Dolby has adopted the use of BS.1770 in preference to Leq(A), he reported.

Gilbert Soulodre of the Communications Research Centre Canada offered a history and methodology for the development and adoption of the BS.1770 standard. Soulodre’s simple, revised, B-weighted Leq meter design proved more accurate than any other submissions, including complex psychoacoustic models for long-term loudness metering. A methodology for metering short-term content is now underway, he reported.

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