3D Audio Alliance Seeking to Build Its Member Base Beyond SRS, AMD

The 3D Audio Alliance is “well on the way” to a spec for MDA (Multi-Dimensional Audio) open, royalty-free 3D audio transmission standards, with the goal of having tools, a player and a spec defining the fundamentals of the MDA program available by the end of this year, John Kellogg, executive director of corporate strategy at SRS Labs, told Consumer Electronics Daily. At SRS’s studio in Santa Monica, Calif., “I can demonstrate MDA live, fully functional, right now,” Kellogg said.

The alliance is demonstrating the technology using movie soundtracks or music for playback through two to 11 speakers and is building a tool that professional mixers can use to create MDA, he said. “We will have an MDA program and a player defined, and our goal is to demonstrate an end-to-end solution by year-end or Q1 2012,” he said. Meanwhile, Kellogg said SRS “has some other ideas” to represent using fewer speakers -- not a surprise given SRS’ strong position in the soundbar market. When asked if SRS would be showing an MDA soundbar product at CES in January, Kellogg said it “might."

SRS Labs and AMD are currently the only two member companies in the alliance, which was formed earlier this year (CED Jan 21 p1). “We think there’s a lot of opportunity for companies to join on the distribution and transmission side,” Kellogg said. Companies like Dolby and DTS “could play there,” said Kellogg, a former Dolby executive. Compression methods will be key to advancing the technology, Kellogg said. “It’s going to be a stretch, other than in the high end, to deliver 75 or 150 audio objects at 48/24 PCM,” he said. “That’s a big payload, so how do we reduce the payload and efficiently deliver it?” Compression and other technologies will be able to “sit on top of” the MDA transmission spec, he said. Queries to DTS and Dolby to gauge interest in the fledgling alliance weren’t returned by our deadline.

Kellogg likened MDA to advanced video technology, which he described as “light years ahead” of the audio world in innovation and development. Video can be mapped to particular pixels, with more pixels leading to better resolution, he said. MDA uses “object-based audio,” where audio is recorded as objects within a 3D space rather than as signals. For monitoring, this audio is individually mapped to the actual speaker configuration being used in the playback venue, Kellogg said. For digital cinema, the renderer can be set to a standardized speaker configuration and the output delivered as multichannel PCM in the usual way, the alliance said.

But the real benefit of the technology appears with alternative speaker configurations, the alliance said. “The audio industry is going the opposite way of what consumers want,” Kellogg said, referring to the number and size of speakers needed in a room. As it moves from 5.1 to 7.1 to 11.2 channels and more, the industry is involved in a “channels arms race,” and that’s “absurd,” Kellogg said. Too much audio development has gone to trying to please “the crankiest .001 percent” of listeners who will accommodate a roomful of speakers, he said, and not enough to those who want the experience of an “audio dome” but don’t want to “go through the pain,” he said.

"What if we could make a soundbar really sound like a surround system?” Kellogg asked. “That’s what everybody wants.” New form factors such as tablets push the need for such technologies, and channel-based audio can’t deliver the surround-sound experience in a realistic way, Kellogg said. “We're at the end of the road with channel-based audio and the things I'm describing can’t be done if we focus on just channels,” he said. MDA metadata, on the other hand, represents “where the object plays, how loud and where it is in space,” he said. The MDA player determines how many speakers there are in a system, where they are and at what angle in the room, and it will map the “audio dome” to best suit the individual system, Kellogg said.

That should appeal to consumers who will “take their surround-sound speakers and stick them anywhere,” Kellogg said. “We're going to give you the best possible representation based on what you have,” he said. MDA also opens up new product possibilities, he said. A movie mixed on an 11.2-channel system could be delivered to broadcast, digital cinema and Blu-ray players, with the players left to map playback to speakers, he said. “Consumers aren’t going to put up four more height speakers, but what if we could represent that same height experience on a 5.1 system, or a soundbar or a tablet?” he asked. “The way to get there is through object-based audio,” he said.