Legacy in sound: Sky Sports' Martin Black pinpoints his audio career highlights Blits, 5.1, Sky Studios, loudness, Fame, Atmos and live OB mixing By SVG Staff Monday, May 23, 2022 - 11:05
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At the SVG Europe Next Generation Audio event in London in 2017, [left to right] Avid's Simon Sherbourne, Harman's Roger Heiniger, Dolby's Rob France and Sky's Martin Black discussed a year of progress in NGA technologies
Sky sound consultant and senior systems engineer, Martin Black, has spent more than four decades shaping the way we listen to television. Black has always been focused on how things sound; even now, he still sings in a choir.
Graduating from the University of Surrey with a B.Mus Tonmeister degree, Black began his career in broadcast audio in 1979 with Thames Television's outside broadcast division. Then 14 years later, he joined Sky in 1993 where he was a sound supervisor for Sky Sports for over 20 years.
With the advent of HD, Black and his colleague Keith Lane were asked to investigate and specify a mixing console to enable Sky to broadcast its live sport productions in 5.1 surround sound. They ended up designing Sky's entire live 5.1 workflow.
This led to Black and Lane's Ident Tones for Surround (Blits) 5.1 ident system, audio design for Sky's groundbreaking Harlequin-1 HQ, working with the EBU on loudness regulations and Sky's implementation of immersive audio.
Black has also influenced how broadcasters across Europe manage audio with the establishment of the Forum for Advanced Media in Europe (Fame) audio group, which he started with the BBC's Simon Tuff and is sponsored by of the EBU's technology and innovation department. Most recently Fame has been looking at how to manage metadata for object-based audio, which will see Black's legacy live on for years after his retirement.
As he prepares to retire after more than 45 years' dedication to audio, we ask Black to pinpoint five of his career highlights. Overachiever that he is, he gave us seven
5.1 Surround for Sky Sports (2004)
I had been a sound supervisor with Sky Sports for 11 years when in 2004 Vaughan Rogers asked Keith Lane and I to research a mixing console which would enable Sky to start broadcasting in 5.1 surround sound as Sky Sports moved into an HD environment. We spoke to a great many manufacturers, and eventually we ended up doing all the audio design for Sky's first two HD studios, as well as working with outside broadcast companies to create live mixes for Premiership football, cricket and rugby.
The idea was to convert two of Sky's standard studios into HD studios, and I was tasked with looking at how to manage the 5.1 surround sound for HD transmission. There were two main aspects to this; in addition to how to mix the audio, we quickly realised that we needed the infrastructure to handle the huge quantity of ports we'd need for 5.1, and we worked closely with multiple suppliers to give us that capacity.
The format was to have a stereo programme mix and a stereo effects mix, plus a 5.1 surround mix and a 5.1 effects mix. We produced downmixes of both the 5.1s to get the two stereo outputs; the stereo mix was transmitted using the legacy PCM format while the 5.1 surround signals were transcoded from Dolby-E to Dolby Digital for final transmission.
Blits (2005)
Blits was a way to provide a standardised form of channel identification and alignment for surround sound material. It idents all the legs of a 5.1 multichannel signal with a series of short tones at different frequencies to identify each channel. We also use it to phase-check signals.
More importantly, because many viewers were still listening in stereo, we needed the system to derive a stereo Lt/Rt downmix, so Blits needed to make sense when the stereo output was being monitored or metered.
As the accompanying Lt/Rt fold-down mix was created by the Dolby DP563 encoder, we worked closely with Mick Dwyer at Dolby to help us develop a tone sequence which made sense when listening on speakers. It was an important test because 5.1 surround for TV has a different track format to 5.1 for cinema, and live surround TV mix engineers have specific requirements, like lowering the level of the surround channels in the downmix so it doesn't drown out the commentary.
The first job where I used Blits in anger was in a rebuilt outside broadcast truck; I could immediately hear that the main monitoring speakers were not being fed in the correct order! Blits had already became a core part of Sky's 5.1 design and was adopted by several broadcasters in Europe and the US, and was subsequently standardised by the EBU as the recommended 5.1 line-up signal (EBU Tech. 3304).
Sky Studios aka Harlequin-1
A year or two later when Sky designed Harlequin-1 now Sky Studios it was the greenest broadcasting complex in Europe, with a huge audio network to manage; a total of 68 modular IO frames across five floors, nine sound galleries and 10 studio floors. The design brief was that the facility must be flexible, so that each production gallery could use any of the studio floors.
Following my involvement in the development of live 5.1 for HD, I somehow ended up designing and configuring the live audio systems for Sky Studios as well.
The big shift was that Sky Studios was designed from the outset to transport all the audio as discrete linear PCM channels. We created a production format that used the 16 channels of audio in a standard SDI signal. The 16 channels gave us a stereo mix and a stereo effects mix, plus a 5.1 surround mix and a 5.1 effects mix.
It meant we could use the same SDI transport to move the audio around, but using all 16 available audio channels (two x stereo plus two x 5.1) embedded in the SDI signal eliminated the need for any Dolby E e
