Agnostic Media rolls out turnkey sound solution

Television broadcasters knit together a conglomerate of programming and commercials, often resulting in a tapestry of wildly divergent sound levels.

That's about to change, says Jason Turner, president and chief executive officer of Agnostics Media Inc.

at Incline Village.

It released Broadcast Audio Manager, which integrates support for Dolby Laboratories' Dolby DP600 Program Optimizer to provide a turnkey solution for TV stations to smooth out broadcast sound levels.

The application transcodes, or integrates, audio files so that when broadcast, television viewers hear a product that plays at one, not many, decibel levels.

Contrast that with the state of broadcasting now, as commercials blare up to 10 decibels louder (or softer) than the programming that encases them.

Commercials air at varying levels because they're produced at various facilities around the country, says Jeffrey Riedmiller, senior broadcast product manager at Dolby Laboratories in San Francisco.

Everyone "cooks" things at various levels, so there's no consistency.

"In creating the new technology," says Riedmiller, "we went back to the drawing board to study how humans perceive loudness."

Dolby found that people agreed 99 percent of the time on the proper level of speech loudness.

But they showed up to a 14-decibel variation in preference on music and sound effects.

(Most people prefer to listen to television at a loudness level of 62 decibels.) The Dolby DP600 Program Optimizer automatically normalizes the loudness of file based programming and commercials.

It is integrated into Broadcast Audio Manager, allowing broadcasters to transform content automatically into Dolby audio formats.

Dolby and Agnostic jointly demonstrated the technology at the National Association of Broadcasters convention last month in Las Vegas.

Interest has been high, says Turner.

The implications go beyond television broadcasting, he adds.

People can now download TV shows onto computers, iPods and cell phones, so, "There needs to be consistency across all those devices." And, he adds, "The broadcasting industry is moving from videotape to a completely (digital) file-based infrastructure."

Agnostic Media plans to add up to 15 employees this year at its Lake Tahoe office, says Turner.

And, it's studying the feasibility of adding a data center in Reno or Sparks to provide computers and storage for handling media.

It currently employs 15 at Incline Village, plus the salespeople based in major media markets.

Agnostic Media, founded in 2000, relocated to Incline Village in 2005.

Turner says the company, previously called Streaming Media Technologies, changed its name "Because people are very religious about what they do with media technologies.

They didn't take 'streaming media' seriously in the broadcast world." Hence, Agnostic Media.