Tech Focus: Immersive Audio, Part 2 - Surround Microphones Come of Age

Tech Focus: Immersive Audio, Part 2 - Surround Microphones Come of Age 5.1 is increasingly the native audio for sports broadcasting By Dan Daley, Audio Editor

Wednesday, December 8, 2021 - 7:00 am

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Once considered a novelty, dedicated surround microphones have become more common in the sports-broadcasting toolkit as 5.1 became the native audio format for television networks. Soccer in particular, with its expansive pitch to cover, has been deploying this category of multi-transducer mic. As the immersive-audio era edges closer, surround microphones will be seen as well as heard on sports broadcasts. Here are some leading examples.

DPA Microphones

DPA 5100 mobile surround microphone

The DPA 5100 mobile surround microphone is a completely self-contained plug-and-play solution for 5.1 audio capture. It can be flexibly mounted: on a microphone stand, suspended from the ceiling, or via a handgrip. Lightweight and portable, it's also robust and can withstand challenging weather conditions. The 5100 features five miniature pressure transducers, all with low sensitivity to wind and mechanical noise, low distortion, exceptional low-frequency response, and a substantial dynamic range. The three front capsules in this system are time-aligned to eliminate comb filtering, which also ensures frequency consistency when downmixing to stereo or mono. The rear capsules are nested in the advanced separation chambers, spaced optimally both from each other and from the front array to simulate natural time-arrival differences. The goal of DPA's design approach is a surround atmosphere that offers a high degree of coherence, channel separation, and localization accuracy. The 5100 mobile surround microphone requires no external signal processing.

The DPA 4560 CORE binaural headset microphone is a stereo pair of DPA 4060 CORE miniature omnidirectional microphones mounted on the ear hooks of an ergonomically designed headset, designed to create immersive, 3D stereo sound experiences. The omnidirectional pattern also makes it less sensitive to handling, wind, and pop noise. Based on the Head-Related Transfer Function principle and using closely matched transducers, the 4560 replicates the aural perceptivity of the human ear as close to perfectly as possible.

Sennheiser Sennheiser AMBEO VR ambisonic microphone

Specially designed for 360 spatial audio recording, the AMBEO VR is an ambisonic microphone fitted with four matched KE 14 capsules in a tetrahedral arrangement. This special design allows capture of surrounding sound from a single point. As a result, fully spherical ambisonics sound matches VR video/spherical 360 content. The capsules of the AMBEO VR mic deliver A-format, a raw four-channel output that has to be converted into a new set of four channels, the Ambisonics B-format. This is done by the specifically designed AMBEO A-B converter plugin, which is available as a free download for VST, AU, and AAX format for a preferred digital audio workstation for both PC and Mac. B-format is a W, X, Y, Z representation of the sound field around the microphone. (W is the sum of all four capsules; X, Y and Z are virtual bidirectional microphone patterns representing front/back, left/right, and up/down.) Thus, the listener can audition any direction from the microphone during playback of Ambisonics B.

Soundfield Soundfield DSF-B digital ambisonic mic system

The DSF-B is a fully digital ambisonic product system for broadcast. It consists of a DSF-2 MKII microphone for exceptional sound capture, the DSF-2 MKII microphone controller, and the DSF-3 MKII digital surround processor. The system provides simultaneous mono, stereo, and digital surround soundscapes at large-scale live outside broadcast events, such as sports stadiums and concert halls, creating a completely digital surround-sound-production chain. Surround formats supported include conventional 5.1, as well as object-based formats that have additional height channels.

Click here for Tech Focus: Immersive Audio, Part 1 - Infrastructure Waits Out the Pandemic

Click here for Tech Focus: Immersive Audio, Part 3 - Consoles Evolve as Software-Based Solutions

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2021/12/08/tech-focus-immersive-audio-part...
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