SALFORD University researchers will showcase exciting new ideas for the future of television at the world’s largest broadcast trade show.
Dr Ben Shirley and Dr Rob Oldfield, from the Acoustics Research Group, hope to attract interest in their work on enhancing sound for live football and other sports and on improving services for the hearing impaired.
The two fly out to Las Vegas to present their findings at the National Association of Broadcasters exhibition (NAB, April 16-21) which attracts a staggering 100,000 media and entertainment delegates.
Ben said: “When we talk about strengthening the university’s industrial collaborations, this is the ideal place to do it; among the cream of the world’s broadcast businesspeople, engineers and creatives.”
They will exhibit demonstrations of two areas of recent research at a demo room hired by DTS, a partner in the research, and a leading player in object-based audio (OBA) – the new emerging audio format to overtake 5.1 ‘surround’ sound.
Ben and Rob have been collaborating with the technology giant on ‘personalised’ broadcast sound and will demonstrate an application of OBA to personalise TV sound for hearing-impaired and visually impaired people, a growing market and one which is increasingly on the radar of the big broadcasters. Using DTS’ next generation audio technologies they will demonstrate how people with impaired hearing or impaired vision might use the different sound ‘channels’ enabled by OBA to improve their enjoyment of broadcasts.
They also aim to showcase, in Vegas, a second exhibit called SALSA – Spatial Automated Live Sports Audio – which has been developed at Salford and is being integrated into an object-based broadcast workflow in collaboration with DTS and Australian digital audio firm Fairlight. The open OBA standard, ETSI 103223 (Multi-Dimensional Audio), made it an ideal vehicle to unleash the full potential of SALSA’s application to OBA for broadcast. With Fairlight already having implemented MDA, it allowed for SALSA’s integration into real world products a relatively quick development.
“The new integrated SALSA system being demonstrated by DTS, University of Salford, and Fairlight, aims to help live mix engineers and broadcasters more effectively manage live mixing while helping automate the creation of an object-based / immersive mix and overcome the challenges of moving to object-based broadcast,” explained Ben.
