The February Meeting was a joint meeting with the Audio Engineering Society.
SMPTE Detroit Chair Frank Maynard and AES Detroit Chairman Bob Klacza welcomed over 40 members and guests to the February meeting hosted by WWJ-TV (CBS) at their studios near the Detroit riverfront. Section Manager and WWJ-TV Assistant Director of Technical Operations Pete Sockett introduced Tim Carroll from Dolby Laboratories. Tim Carroll is a Broadcast Applications Engineer with Dolby Laboratories at their San Francisco headquarters. He is currently the chairman of the ATSC IS-S3 ad-hoc working group on audio and video synchronization issues.
Mr. Carroll started his presentation with a look at the history of multi-channel audio for television and presented an overview of Dolby sound recording technology. He explained how the Dolby Digital 5.1 channel audio and AC-3 encoding format became the ATSC standard for DTV audio, and that it is currently used in DVD, direct satellite distribution, and digital cable TV, in addition to its use in movie theatres since 1992. Mr. Carroll described how Dolby E was developed to enable distribution of up to eight audio channels, plus metadata, via AES3 digital audio pairs, or pairs of tracks on VTRs and video servers. The subject of audio synchronization in DTV was discussed in detail, and Mr. Carroll described the typical audio plant structures and gave some tips on how to ensure normal operation with multi-channel audio.
A Q&A session followed the presentation.