Linear Acoustic Helps Audio Obey the Law

Tim Carroll
"I'm concerned about bridging the dichotomy between quality and obeying the law," said Tim Carroll, founder and president of Linear Acoustic, as he unveiled two of his company's latest accomplishments.

"We're convinced that there's a better way. We can protect a broadcaster from a fine, but we're not going to do it to the detriment of the content producers."

Carroll, speaking at an NAB Show press conference, said that with the new broadcast audio loudness regulations, there's a delicate balance to strike between delivering a quality experience to television consumers and staying within broadcast regulations.

Two new Linear Acoustic products—AERO.calm and the LQ-1000 Loudness Quality Multimeter—have been engineered to help broadcasters do just that.

The AERO.calm—or "Coded Audio Loudness Manager"—provides management of audio content within the compressed domain, preserving quality that could otherwise be lost in additional decoding and re-encoding steps. The unit supports AES, SDI, DVB-ASI,\ and IP transport stream I/O.

The LQ-1000 provides "high density" loudness metering and features real-time Dolby Dialogue Intelligence technology. Like AERO.calm, it works with a number of signal formats, including AES, SD/HD-SDI, DVB-ASI (MPEG transport streams), as well as with IP transport streams. © 2011 NAB

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James E. O’Neal has more than 50 years of experience in the broadcast arena, serving for nearly 37 years as a television broadcast engineer and, following his retirement from that field in 2005, moving into journalism as technology editor for TV Technology for almost the next decade. He continues to provide content for this publication, as well as sister publication Radio World, and others. He authored the chapter on HF shortwave radio for the 11th Edition of the NAB Engineering Handbook, and serves as editor-in-chief of the IEEE’s Broadcast Technology publication, and as associate editor of the SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal. He is a SMPTE Life Fellow, and a Life Member of the IEEE and the SBE.