Audio in Cable, Broadcast, and Satellite Distribution Issues & Solutions for the Digital Transition via Audio Metadata

This paper covers the audio content delivery processes currently used throughout the video industry with a specific focus on the cable distribution infrastructure. This infrastructure has, for the first time, the capability of delivering high quality digital audio services and programming to subscribers' homes. These systems give the subscriber the ability to make new listening choices, based on their own needs and desires. Enabling these new subscriber choices requires greater care than ever before in preserving all the audio information from its original creation through the programmer uplinks and cable headends to the subscriber's home. Historically, each signal routing point between content origination and the subscriber's home has applied some processing to the signals as they pass through; providing the highest quality audio with these new features to the subscriber requires rethinking many of the current practices such that the actual digital audio information is carried without manipulation through to the subscriber's home. These new features are supported by the metadata carried within the Dolby Digital bitstream, and this paper describes this metadata and how to put it to proper use in cable delivery systems.

Published

2000-10

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00171

ISBN

978-1-61482-933-1