Carrying Multichannel Audio in a Stereo Production and Distribution Infrastructure

As the demand for multichannel audio increases, handling 5.1 sound channels within today's two-channel audio infrastructure has become a significant issue. To address this need, a new coding system called Dolby E capable of carrying up to eight channels of audio through a traditional stereo infrastructure, has been developed. While this system is based on perceptual coding principles and audio data compression, it has also been designed to meet constraints imposed by operational practices of program production, such as video frame boundary editing and multigeneration use. This paper provides a technical overview of the system, describing the architecture and design of the encoder and decoder. It also details the work currently under way on standardizing how stereo broadcast equipment should handle and pass such signals, and the ways this technology is being made available to manufacturers of broadcast system components.

Print ISSN

0036-1682

Published

2002-02

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/J16393