Emerging immersive audio is now firmly on SMPTE's agenda. In an overview of the activities being undertaken by the newly established Technology Committee on Digital Sound Systems (25CSS), Brian Vessa, Executive Director, Digital Audio Mastering, Sony Pictures Entertainment declared audio to be 50 per cent of the experience “yet little attention has been paid to audio during digital projection rollout.”
During the NAB Technology Summit on Cinema, co-produced by SMPTE, he reported that SMPTE's 25CSS study group is setting out to address this. “Making a movie soundtrack sound consistent in multiple venues is a big challenge. One of the issues is that many sound systems in theatres are two decades old, system upgrades are rare and the acoustics are variable. The majority of cinema theatre calibration is done by technicians without a lot of training and the industry's current standards are also becoming dated.”