A Guide to Audio for HDTV in Europe

Overview		Production		Distribution		Transmission		Set-Top Box Requirements

How do I transport multichannel audio around my broadcast infrastructure?

The elegant solution for distribution of multichannel audio and metadata is Dolby^® E technology. It allows up to eight channels of audio and associated metadata to be carried on a single AES pair around a station, over long distance links, or on tape.

Dolby E has major benefits for the broadcaster, including the assurance that audio and metadata (used to control the sound playback in different environments) will always remain together. As it carries both audio and metadata, which is used to control how the audio will sound in different replay environments, you know that these will always be kept together. It also withstands multiple encode/decode cycles without any perceptible loss of quality and enables seamless switching between stereo and 5.1 audio.

When the ITU-R set standards for multichannel audio recording for television and set up multigenerational listening tests, Dolby E was the only codec shown to meet the body's performance criteria.

Find out how you could carry Dolby E audio through your broadcast infrastructure by contacting the Dolby broadcast systems group or your local Dolby distributor.