Program Presentation Using ATSC Audio Systems

This paper is an overview of the Audio system that has been selected by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) for use in the US and Canadian High Definition Television systems, and has been selected as the preferred method of carrying the audio in the Australian HDTV system. — It starts by start by examining why producers would want to use multichannel sound for television, what the requirements for a multichannel audio system are, and perhaps most importantly, the operational changes that will have to make in going from the one or two channel system used with NTSC television to a multiple channel sound system. — The paper continues by examining some of the features and service options that are provided by the ATSC specification, then examines a method of enabling the rest of the broadcast chain to handle multichannel sound and the metadata that DTV receivers depend on.