3D Audio Alliance to Promote Open, Royalty-Free Audio Standards
The 3D Audio Alliance (3DAA) is being formed to drive development of open, royalty-free 3D audio transmission standards with a goal of setting specifications by Q2 2012, said Allen Gharapetian, vice president of marketing at SRS Labs.
The group, set up separately from SRS, will have seven founding members to be chosen in Q1, Gharapetian said. The 3DAA technical working group will have a teleconference in March as it begins creating standards to govern transmission of object-based audio to a range of listening environments from home theaters to large venues, Gharapetian said.
The aim is for 3D audio to be handled the same as conventional 5.1 mixing, so it can be optimized over an array of consumer playback systems. 3DAA said it’s dealing with audio content with a single timeline and mix that doesn’t vary with playback. It won’t take up audio content with multiple possible timelines and mixes depending on playback. Under the 3DAA proposal, rather than recording speaker signals, a system records audio as separate objects in a 3D space. The audio is individually mapped to the speaker configuration used in a playback setting, 3DAA said. The 3DAA encoder is designed to create backward compatible core for legacy 5.1 delivery systems.
3DAA, led by Executive Director Florencia Dazzi, will push at first for studio support with a goal of bringing the technology to consumer products in 2013 or 2014, Gharapetian said. The 3DAA charter was established in June, and the group’s board met for the first time in September, the group said. Founding members pay a $50,000 annual fee. 3DAA members grant reciprocal worldwide royalty-free license to essential patents to the organization and other members. A compliance and 3DAA trademarks program will be created, the group said. Technical working groups will start on a teleconference schedule, and the 3DAA will have quarterly “in-person” meetings. The 3DAA board will meet monthly by teleconference.
"Our intention is to get Hollywood, CE manufacturers, content creators and others to recognize the delivery pipe … how you get the information … changed to a format that you can manipulate based on the system you have,” Gharapetian said. “If you have 5.1 system or a movie theater with a 27.2 system, you will really get all the information and data that is there. The system will automatically recognize” the listening environment. It wasn’t clear whether SRS rivals Dolby Laboratories and DTS would join 3DAA. DTS declined to comment and Dolby wasn’t immediately available for comment.
Among the keys for 3DAA will be bringing movie studios into the organization, Gharapetian said. At CES, SRS showed an 11.1 system designed to deliver “very immersive sound” down to a 2.1 environment, SRS officials said. “The real key is getting as many studios as we can to sign up and from a studio perspective it has to make commercial sense,” Gharapetian said. “If you can save one day of sound mixing, the studios will jump."
Meanwhile, SRS Labs also has developed SRS CircleCinema 3D, designed to bring audio depth to 3D TVs. The technology also will start appearing in speaker bars in Q2, SRS officials said. SRS CircleCinema 3D will be featured in brands including Vizio and Samsung products, SRS officials said.
With SRS having settled its lawsuit with Sony (CED Sept 14 p1), its surround sound technology will appear in the CE manufacturer’s Dash products this year, and the goal is to extend it into other devices, including TVs, in 2012, Gharapetian said. Sony paid SRS $900,000 to settle a dispute over virtual-surround sound technology and licenses three of its patents. Sony was a longtime SRS customer when it introduced its own virtual-surround sound technology in 2007 under the S-Force banner, triggering the legal battle.