ISS SEMINAR With the 2008 Olympics placing unprecedented expectations on China’s TV infrastructure, its elite audio engineers met to share their experiences at the Second International Surround Sound Seminar In China, people are mostly familiar with surround sound through its use in cinemas and – increasingly – home theatre systems. More recently, multichannel PC games have begun to appear, bringing surround into the youth mainstream. As FM radio broadcast has been in stereo since the 1970s, it may come as a surprise that television broadcast is still mainly monaural. With the 2008 Olympics scheduled for Beijing, however, the requirement for live high-definition television broadcasting is set to bring the nation’s television infrastructure up to date in a hurry. There are exceptions, of course… Since March 2005, China Central Television Station’s music channel has been transmitting stereo, and CCTV and the Shanghai Media Group began HDTV broadcasting with Dolby AC-3 surround sound for their pay TV channels to 43 cities on 1 January this year. Some of the TV stations in provinces and cities with more advanced infrastructures – such as Guangdong TV, Shandong TV, Tianjin TV, Qingdao TV and Jiangsu TV – have been equipped with HDTV systems that also include multichannel audio facilities. The best example among them is Shandong TV (SDTV), which can transmit in HDTV from Qingdao (the partner city with Beijing in 2008 Olympics for water sports) to Beijing. SDTV has complete 5.1 surround sound live production and music master production systems in its HDTV studio that has been in operation since September of 2005. The main purpose of the broad-caster’s HDTV facility is for entertainment, news gathering and live broadcasting. For this, SDTV has a Euphonix System 5 digital console, Dynaudio Acoustics Air25 5.1 monitor speakers and Fairlight Satellite 4 DAW in its audio control room for high-quality TV sound production. Shandong TV also bought sets of microphones from DPA, Neumann and Schoeps (the KFM360 sphere surround) to source its surround audio. Engineers at SDTV have produced various live performance programmes already, and all programmes have synchronised video and multichannel audio materials archived in order to allow future HDTV/surround broadcast. The more adventurous Chinese broadcasting concerns began studying multichannel surround sound recording and production techniques back in 1999, predominantly for working with music recording, sports event reporting, live broadcasting, TV drama productions and so on. In 2003, a Chinese translation (from the original Japanese) of the Surround Sound Recording Manual written by Masaki ‘Mick’ Sawaguchi (when he was with NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation) was published in mainland China, and this book has quickly become a surround sound reference that almost every audio engineer in China now owns. More recently, in October of 2004, the first International Surround Sound Hands-on Seminar (ISS) was held in Guangzhou. Most of the country’s leading recording engineers attended this event, at which world-renowned surround sound masters Masaki Sawaguchi (now a consultant to the Pioneer Corporation) and Andrea Borgato from Dolby were invited to speak. The purpose of the seminar was to enable Chinese engineers to gain a better understanding of surround at first-hand, from the most knowledgeable experts in the world. The seminar was held again this year for the second time – from 22 to 24 April in Jinan, the capital city of Shandong province, sponsored by Shandong TV. ISS is heavily dependent on the sharing of professional engineers’ personal experience of working with surround sound technology and the skills required. Therefore the support from a local TV station is very important. For their experience outside of Chinese broadcasting, we invited Masaki Sawaguchi noted NHK surround sound engineer Akira Fukada from Japan, and Dr Wieslaw Woszczyk, the president-elect of AES. At this year’s seminar, local Chinese engineers played their surround sound demos and made presentations about the recording and production techniques involved. For instance, Wei Lou (of the China TV Drama Production Center) spoke about his experience of using a Holophone microphone system and the importance of the acoustic environment, as these concerns will both be important factors in live surround recording and miking for sports events – including the 2008 Olympics. Lewen Wang (of August First Film Studio) discussed how he approached picking up the right surround sound balance when he covered the launching of Shenzhou 6 spaceship earlier this year. Mr Sawaguchi offered his thoughts on how to capture a good surround feed for live events and what he believes to be the key considerations for sound for live programmes. He showed various real-world examples of miking arrangements and played some demonstrations of their use. These were particularly helpful to local colleagues who are expecting to be involved in live sports miking and other surround sound recordings in the near future. Mr Fukada made a presentation titled Music Surround for Enhanced Creativity, in which he emphasised that teaching exactly what ought to be done in surround is impossible, so you have to have a clear idea in mind about what kind of sound you want to create. Even though the theories developed by academic studies are very useful to the recording engineer, he maintains that we can’t be certain that the best result is always obtained through working in strict accordance with the theory. So in the real world, we have to re-arrange the theory in our own ways in order to get good results. He told attendees that the experience and imagination of the engineer is vital in this respect, and then went on to describe some techniques and personal experiences of creating surround sound, and played impressive demos to the captivated audience. Even though most of the examples were recorded in music concert halls, the miking techniques are equally applicable to live sport. Commenting on the second ISS, Guoqiang Han, the president of SDTV, said that there is a pressing and urgent need for us to further improve the nation’s surround sound techniques, especially given the countdown to the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the rapid development of Chinese digital, high-definition television industry. He concluded that all of the experts present at the seminar could help push forward the development of China’s surround sound production by sharing their valuable experience and advanced techniques of surround sound. Pro Audio Asia September-October 2006 Contact: [email protected]

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