Archive notice: This article was originally published on December 16, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Experts from Bayerischer Rundfunk and the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS discussed the potential and possibilities of this technology with participants from the automotive industry and from device and chip manufacturers.
BR Director of Radio Dr. Johannes Grotzky emphasized: “As a public-service broadcaster, Bayerischer Rundfunk is interested in promoting new broadcast technologies through suitable programming. Advancing these transitions, however, requires coordinated action.”
Ernst Dohlus, head of BR’s Production and Broadcasting department, provided an overview of the varied surround activities at other ARD broadcasters in his role as a member of the broadcast directors’ conference. He explained: “The production requirements for surround are now largely in place. The cost of equipping studios and outside-broadcast vehicles, as well as the effort required to integrate DAB Surround into broadcast operations, are now manageable.”
Bayern 4 Klassik will demonstrate the clear added value of surround for music playback on Sunday, December 28, 2008. From 10 a.m. to midnight, the program will offer a representative cross-section of the 200 surround productions created by BR to date, encompassing every facet, style, and era: early music, classical and romantic music, opera, contemporary music, film music, and jazz. All broadcasts will be transmitted via DVB-S radio
. With support from Fraunhofer IIS, DAB Surround operation and MP3 Surround web radio will also be tested on this occasion.
To upgrade DAB digital radio from stereo to DAB Surround, the studio infrastructure must support surround sound. The remaining conversion is straightforward: the conventional audio-coding process is simply supplemented by the new MPEG Surround coding process. Olaf Korte, project manager for digital radio at Fraunhofer
IIS, explained the advantages: “The transition is extremely easy with MPEG Surround. The process is so efficient that surround sound can be transmitted over the same channel previously used for stereo.”
Korte added that this is important because it means broadcasters incur no additional transmission costs. According to Korte, the second major advantage primarily concerns digital radio receivers: “Future DAB Surround receivers will deliver impressive sound. But existing DAB radios will not simply fall silent, because they reproduce the same signal in familiar stereo quality.” Current devices can therefore continue to be used.
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