--
Sounds good --
Fri, 16 Jan 2015 11:31
--
The audio industry has witnessed major innovative and creative changes in the past few years. From sound post for film, television, video games or new media to the preservation, restoration and archiving of media assets and full digital content services, industry leaders have come up with a combination of award-winning technology and just plain simple ideas to overcome all the challenges.
For millions of years, sound was a natural phenomenon; only existing in the moment and time it was produced. Then came the development of technology, allowing the recording and reproduction of those audible moments we could hear around us and hence the development of radio, cinema and television.
There is a saying that sound is half the picture or 70% of what you see . Audio is undoubtedly most important in television and film production but, being human we decided to abuse the very technology we created and soon excessive and inexpedient use of compression, limiting and maximisation caused audio to suffer considerably. The greed of a few, whose desire it was to pinch more and more of the spectrum, led to a war in the television industry resulting in a bold effort to bolster audience comfort, particularly during commercial breaks.
Over the past year or two, new broadcast standards have been introduced inciting the said loudness wars and after heavy battle, we are finally at peace and with new equipment that allows for compliance with these standards production, post and broadcast professionals now have a valuable and efficient set of tools in the ongoing fight against the said loudness.
With these new standards, cross-genre programme material can finally co-exist, and volume knobs and remote buttons can expect a longer life, while audiences will get a far more pleasant listening experience.
Changing times
The audio post-production market has changed quite dramatically over the past five to eight years. Overall there are fewer productions and budgets have been tightened as a result of the world economic decline . There has certainly been a decline in independent post facilities; those without their own production arms rely solely on third party product to keep their doors open. Some of the major studios that have sound facilities have an advantage over these independent post facilities. They support their own needs and requirements creating creative content for their studio s releases.
In 2014 Warner Brother Post-Production Services and Warner Brothers Game Audio department launched the world s first-ever virtual production stage. The new state of-the-art facility offers a 250 square-metre space with Optitrak motion capture facilities and audio capability to enable the actors voice performances to be recorded for post live, thus eliminating the need to lay in audio tracks later. The majority of production in the new facility is for the games market.
New console technology and increasing resources in PCs have made significant amounts of processing power and memory available to games and other interactive applications and thus an upsurge in audio production in the gaming industry.
Previous trends in game audio revolved around squeezing audio solutions into low memory and designing effects with minimised processor usage.
In contrast, current trends arise due to the vast flexibility available for interactive audio given by high processing power and more memory. While interactive audio was dominantly the domain of games, wider availability of high-level audio application programming interfaces (APIs) have opened up more possibilities for research, training and educational applications. The use of HD formats and widespread acceptance of multichannel audio has led to 5.1 and 7.1 channels becoming a standard specification on many computer games and developers are even looking to new possibilities including the potential application of ambisonics in games. The full-sphere surround sound technique was developed back in the 1970 s but it is only now that off-the-shelf hardware is close to allowing its possible use in gaming.
Emerging technology trends
Audio coding has emerged as a critical technology in numerous audio applications. In particular, it is a key component of mobile multimedia applications in the consumer market including wireless audio broadcast, Internet radio and streaming music, music downloads, storage and playback, mobile audio recording and Internet-based teleconferencing, on a variety of platforms including digital audio broadcast radio receivers, portable music players, mobile phones and personal computers.
The frontiers of compression have been pushed further, allowing carriage of full- bandwidth signals at very low bit rates to the point where recent coding systems are considered appropriate for some broadcasting applications, particularly relatively expensive wireless communication channels such as satellite or cellular channels.
In television and broadcast, there is considerable research activity exploring audio presentation that is more immersive than the pervasive consumer 5.1 channel audio systems. The industry has applied the label of 3D Audio to such explorations, since the common thread is the use of many loudspeakers positioned around, above and below the listener.
It s a big story, so big that the European Broadcast Union (EBU) has founded a work group for 3D audio or Immersive Audio and the MPEG Committee has begun work on immersive sound coding.
In the cinema world, Dolby Laboratories Atmos is the name of a surround sound technology taking immersive audio into the silver screen theatre at a whole new level. Atmos technology allows for an unlimited number of audio tracks in theatres for optimal, dynamic rendering to loudspeakers based on theatre capabilities.
Atmos enables the audio enginee
Most recent headlines
09/11/2025
Dalet today announced a transformative leap forward for media operations: Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) that unifies the Dalet ecosystem under one natura...
20/10/2025
Inside TAMS: How Time-Addressable Media Stores could redefine sports workflows By Paul Markham
Friday, October 17, 2025 - 08:57
Print This Story
A penalty...
20/10/2025
Transformational production: Inside TVN's remote production push for the DFL...
20/10/2025
How NBC Sports Transitioned Stamford Facility to One Format: 1080p HDRMulti-year plan harmonizes workflows, simplifies operationsBy Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial ...
20/10/2025
NBA on NBC' Studio Production Team Is Ready for Tip-Off With Coast-to-Coast...
20/10/2025
Under pressure: TVN CEO Markus Osthaus considers the German sports broadcasting ...
20/10/2025
(L-R) Maria Dizzia, Carmen Emmi, and Russell Tovey attend the Plainclothes pre...
20/10/2025
In March, we launched Concerts Near You to help listeners find concerts from their favorite artists. Since then, more than 3 million people have used it to disc...
20/10/2025
Em diversas cidades do Brasil, um movimento tem se fortalecido para celebrar o poder, a beleza e a profundidade da criatividade negra. O Dia AMPLIFIKA, agora em...
20/10/2025
In cities across Brazil, a movement is growing that celebrates the power, beauty, and depth of Black creativity. AMPLIFIKA Day, now in its fifth edition, return...
20/10/2025
Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft rendering...
20/10/2025
DENVER and MUNICH Imagine Communications today announced its plans to acquire Pixel Power Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Rohde & Schwarz. Financial terms of...
20/10/2025
LOS ANGELES G Morgan has joined Globecast, a provider of broadcast, media and entertainment managed services, as executive vice president of sales, Globecast Am...
20/10/2025
PLYMOUTH, Wisc. Heartland Video Systems and Zixi have partnered to enable broadcast-quality live video delivery over any IP network....
20/10/2025
A. R. Rahman on Facing Fear and Finding the Divine In an interview with Berklee President Jim Lucchese, the Oscar-winning composer reflects on how courage and...
20/10/2025
Monday 20 October 2025
To view this content, please enable our use of cookies. ...
20/10/2025
Rohde & Schwarz transfers Pixel Power to Imagine Communications Companies work collaboratively to ensure continuity and ongoing support for existing customers...
20/10/2025
RT 's Prime Time is set to host the final Presidential Election Debate this Tuesday night, October 21, providing an opportunity to hear directly from Irelan...
20/10/2025
NVIDIA and Google Cloud are expanding access to accelerated computing to transform the full spectrum of enterprise workloads, from visual computing to agentic a...
19/10/2025
Back to All News
Sins of Kujo' Comes to Life in New Live-Action Series Set for Spring 2026
Entertainment
19 October 2025
GlobalJapan
Link copied to cl...
18/10/2025
New England Sports Network (NESN) has chosen Harmonic, working with Astound Business Solutions, as its enterprise technology partner to transform primary distri...
18/10/2025
NEW ORLEANS, La. In the run-up to the start of the NBA season, WVUE-TV and Gray Local Media have announced a deal with DirecTV that will greatly expand access t...
18/10/2025
Berklee Celebrates 40 Years of the Fall Together Concert Faculty composers Bob Pilkington and Greg Hopkins are among the featured artists for this year's ...
17/10/2025
NEP Group Receives New Equity Investment From 26North Partners LP, Co-InvestorsCarlyle remains the largest shareholder as the company prepares for the futureBy ...
17/10/2025
Apple Lands Five-Year Deal for F1 Distribution in the U.S.Besides airing on Apple TV, the sport will be amplified on other Apple servicesBy Ken Kerschbaumer, Ed...
17/10/2025
SVG Sit-Down: Marshall Electronics' Bernie Keach on the Future of PTZ Camera...
17/10/2025
L2 Productions' REMI Facility in Austin Can Produce Content From AnywhereMusic festivals, sports events are produced via flypacks and remote control roomsBy...
17/10/2025
By Lucy Spicer
One of the most exciting things about the Sundance Film Festival...
17/10/2025
(L-R) Christopher Meyer, Addison Timlin, Cooper Raiff, Lili Reinhart, Alyah Chan...
17/10/2025
M sica e arte se uniram em uma noite especial na semana passada na ZIV Gallery, ...
17/10/2025
Music and art came together for one special night last week at ZIV Gallery, an i...
17/10/2025
Spotify and FC Barcelona are extending our partnership through 2030, continuing a collaboration that's redefining how fans, players, and artists connect. Th...
17/10/2025
MURRIETA, Calif. The Sports Fishing Championship (SFC) has deployed DigitalGlue's creative.space storage platform to streamline video production by centrali...
17/10/2025
BELLEVUE, Wash. Football continued to cement its reputation as a bulwark of TV advertising in Q3 2025 with new data from iSpot that showed both the NFL and coll...
17/10/2025
The Sports Fishing Championship (SFC), the premier competitive saltwater fishing series, has transformed its production workflow by adopting creative.space, the...
17/10/2025
QuickLink, a leading provider of award-winning multi-camera video productions and remote contribution solutions, announces the release of StudioPro Version 4, ...
17/10/2025
Although the annual Grammy Awards celebration is best known for recognizing achievements in the recording industry, the show often proves a visual spectacle as ...
17/10/2025
OpenDrives, Inc., a leading provider of software-defined data storage and data services, has promoted Alex Dunfey to Chief Technology Officer (CTO) from his for...
17/10/2025
The University of Arizona (UofA) has significantly upgraded its broadcast communication infrastructure with the integration of Riedel Communications' advanc...
17/10/2025
Harmonic (NASDAQ: HLIT) today announced that New England Sports Network (NESN), owned by Fenway Sports Group and Delaware North, has selected Harmonic as its en...
17/10/2025
Austin PBS has recently upgraded its facility-wide communications infrastructure, deploying Clear-Com 's Eclipse HX, FreeSpeak II beltpacks, and V-Series ...
17/10/2025
ZEISS announces an open call for the closed BETA testing phase of CinCraft Virtual Lens Technology, the innovative digital tool that brings authentic lens chara...
17/10/2025
Situated in the town of Kokkola, Centria University of Applied Sciences offers higher education across five core fields: engineering, business, social and healt...
17/10/2025
Public information channel in Georgia, USA, to implement a powerful, simple, and cost-effective playout automation platform.
Pebble, the leading automation, co...
17/10/2025
HBO Max is reporting that it has launched in 15 new markets, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Macau, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Ukraine, boosting the streaming serv...
17/10/2025
Netflix said it will make a major push into video podcasts, inking a wide-ranging deal with Spotify through which it will offer 16 podcasts in the U.S. starting...
17/10/2025
Lexington, Ky. As part of a push to highlight its advanced advertising capabilities, Viamedia has launched a new AI-powered ad tech platform and officially rebr...
17/10/2025
NEW YORK QuickLink has announced the release of StudioPro Version 4, which the company is calling the most significant upgrade yet to its flagship video product...
17/10/2025
NEW YORK and CUPERTINO, Calif. Apple and NBCUniversal said they will sell Apple TV and Peacock streaming bundles to U.S. subscribers starting Oct. 20....
-- 
