Chinese Central Television (CCTV) – the predominant state television broadcaster in mainland China – has specified the Linear Acoustic LA-5269 Dolby Digital/Plus transcoder for its new HD-ready broadcast facilities in Beijing. The LA-5269 can encode, decode and transcode all of the most popular multi-channel audio formats in use by television broadcasters today, says the developer. Metadata is supported via an RS-485 connection and can be extracted from an applied HD or SD-SDI signal. Linear Acoustic transcoders are already in operation on CCTV-3 (arts and entertainment), CCTV-5 (sports) and CCTV-8 (series television), and will eventually be installed on all 24 CCTV HD channels, which are accessible to more than one billion viewers. Mr Xu Gangming, director of CCTV’s Transmission Department, said that the LA-5269 had “not only simplified the system structure, but also provides stable, high performance 5.1-channel surround encoding for our HD channels. It fits the rigorous requirements of handling audio metadata and supporting the top quality programme production and distribution we demand at CCTV.”
Daniel Wang, Linear Acoustic senior business development manager Asia, emphasised the collaborative nature of the project: “We’ve been working side-by-side with the CCTV engineers since the early design phase of the project, doing our best to help make their transition to HD as smooth as possible.” – David Davies8D29
