Tim Carroll

“I’m concerned about bridging the dichotomy between quality and obeying the law,” said Tim Carroll, founder and president of Linear Acoustic, as he unveiled two of his company’s latest accomplishments.

“We’re convinced that there’s a better way. We can protect a broadcaster from a fine, but we’re not going to do it to the detriment of the content producers.”

Carroll, speaking at a Monday press conference, said that with the new broadcast audio loudness regulations, there’s a delicate balance to strike between delivering a quality experience to television consumers and staying within broadcast regulations.

Two new Linear products have been engineered to help broadcasters do just that: AERO.calm and the LQ-1000 Loudness Quality Multimeter.

The AERO.calm — or “Coded Audio Loudness Manager” — provides management of audio content within the compressed domain, preserving quality that could otherwise be lost in additional decoding and reencoding steps. The unit supports AES, SDI, DVB-ASI, and IP transport stream I/O.

The LQ-1000 provides “high density” loudness metering and features real-time Dolby Dialogue Intelligence technology. Like AERO.calm, it works with a number of signal formats, including AES, SD/HDSDI, DVB-ASI (MPEG transport streams), as well as with IP transport streams.

—James O’Neal, TV Technology