California-based Wohler Technologies is now licensing loudness control technology from a company called Eyeheight, headquartered in the Watford, UK, and making it available to customers using the openGear architecture from Ross Video. The openGear platform accepts various cards that make all types of signal processing technology available to broadcasters that have committed their infrastructure to the modular, standard sized frame.
Eyeheight is known for developing a wide variety of test & measurement devices— hardware legalizers, logo generators, safe-area generators, keyers, color correctors and aspect ratio converters—that help broadcasters ensure compliance with various technical and governmental mandates.
Under terms of the new agreement, Wohler will integrate Eyeheight’s KARMAudio loudness control technology into a 2-RU card compatible with any Ross openGear frame, and with the openGear DashBoard network control and monitoring application. The new Wohler openGear card equipped with KARMAudio loudness control technology is available now.
Don Bird, chief marketing officer at Wohler, said the idea is to bring Eyeheight’s signal-processing technology to the marketplace as an “attractively priced loudness-control solution.”
For several years Wohler has supported broadcasters' efforts to comply with the new CALM Act to control audio loudness and improve the listening experience for TV viewers. Its modular AMP2-16V 16-channel audio- and video-monitoring platform, and Pandora loudness analyzers are both used extensively by most of the major TV networks and hundreds of local affiliated stations.
Wohler recently announced that it is providing the ancillary data and captioning capabilities of its HDCC solution on the openGear platform, and the KARMAudio solution represents an attempt to address loudness control among users of Ross Video’s openGear platform.
The automatic perceptual loudness control offered by KARMAudio technology is based on ITU-R BS.1770 multichannel perceptual loudness and true peak measurements, and a series of proprietary correction algorithms. KARMAudio products make it easy for users to comply with emerging loudness specifications, such as ATSC A/85:2009/2011 (as required by S.2847).
