Tim CarrollQ. What kind of products or services does your company offer for broadcasters?
Linear Acoustic, a Telos company, is a leading authority in audio solutions for digital television. The company designs and manufactures award-winning loudness control, upmixing, and distribution products and licenses key technologies to OEM partners. The company participates in standards work within the AES, IEEE, BKSTS and EBU, is a member of the ATSC, and is a sustaining member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.
Q. What's new that you will exhibit at the NAB Show and what should broadcasters look for there?
Linear Acoustic will be showing the AERO.qc Ingest and Production controller which combines loudness measurement, metering, control, and upmixing tools with extensive audio monitoring capabilities. Functions normally requiring multiple boxes, cabling, and configuration are contained in one comprehensive product.
We will also be showing a radical addition our e-squared 16-channel audio and metadata distribution system, which was used during this year's 81st Academy Awards broadcast. This change makes the system even more error resilient.
In addition, we will be highlighting our technologies as used by licensing and OEM partners demonstrating both a variety of useful technologies and the ability to deliver them in many different form factors.
There will also be displays of updates to existing products, including the availability of Dolby Digital (AC-3) encoding in our cost-effective AERO.one 1-RU DTV loudness controller.
Q. How is your new product offering different from what's available on the market?
There is no other product that combines all of the features found in AERO.qc and delivers them as cost effectively. It is the answer to requests from many customers and will ease the production and ingest of 5.1 and stereo programming.
The e-squared system as implemented in the StreamStacker-HD is the only product capable of carrying 16 channels of audio and metadata. With programming evolving to multiple languages and alternate versions, a e-squared represents a unique value.
Finally, the AERO.one with built in Dolby Digital (AC-3) encoding is the only single rack unit DTV loudness controller to offer built-in audio encoding required for transmission. The only other DTV loudness controller to offer built-in encoding is the AERO.air which will also be on display.
Q. How has your company been affected by the current economic situation and what are you doing to get through it?
As part of Telos, Linear Acoustic is in the unique position of being a debt-free company with resources to invest in R&D and new product development. We strongly believe in the idea of products evolving from one box per solution to many solutions in one box. This benefits customers by reducing complexity and in these difficult economic times, by reducing cost. We have also added applications engineers and other expert staff located across the US and around the world to provide support for our customers. We are keenly aware that simply designing a product, releasing it, and hoping for the best is not a recipe for long-term success. We see the purchase of a Linear Acoustic product as an investment that includes access to our experience and expertise. Unlike any other DTV audio manufacturer, our customers can get support 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. We take our responsibility very seriously.
Q. Where are you based, and how many employees do you have? Anything else we should know about your company?
Linear Acoustic is a division of Telos and is headquartered in Lancaster, PA. We have offices in Cleveland, Beijing, London, Germany, and Latvia. We employ approximately 15 people in this division. Our products are designed and assembled in the USA and expertly represented and supported world-wide.
