A television engineer once told me that he’d been in the industry long enough to remember when audio was the simple part of TV: “If you turned up the volume and heard sound, you were all set.” The transition to DTV changed all of that as broadcasters wrapped their heads around multichannel audio as well as loudness and compliance issues, and now the emergence of immersive audio and the deployment of ATSC 3.0 has introduced an entirely new television audio lexicon. We thought it might be time to help untangle the ball of TV audio twine.

Linear Acoustic® AMS Authoring and Monitoring System is a comprehensive solution for real-time authoring, rendering, and monitoring of advanced audio programs for the ATSC 3.0 Digital Television System. The audio system in ATSC 3.0 provides listeners with a personalized, immersive audio experience using Next Generation Audio (NGA) technologies, including MPEG-H. AMS simultaneously delivers advanced audio for ATSC 3.0 broadcasts and 5.1-/2-ch audio for ATSC 1.0 broadcasts.