MPEG-H Audio - Personalized Immersive Sound

Personalized Sound Experiences

With its unique personalization features, the MPEG-H Audio system enables users to adjust dialogue levels and audio description settings, allowing the entertainment experience to become interactive and tailored to individual preferences and needs.

The sound system delivers these unique interactivity features through MPEG-H object-based coding, in which each sound element is defined as an individual element or object. As opposed to classic, channel-based approaches, such systems assign metadata to each object to define its properties. This technology enables viewers to adjust the sound mix to their preferences, for instance to boost hard-to-understand dialogue or to choose a “home team“-mix of a sports broadcast. It can also be used to efficiently add descriptions for visually impaired audience members to a broadcast and to add additional languages to a film’s dialogue. All without interrupting the viewing experience – using only 20-40 kbit/s for each language.

Immersive Sound

MPEG-H Audio delivers a new level of sound going beyond stereo and surround thanks to sound coming from above and even from below. Adding height helps listeners experience sound in a much more realistic and natural way. The audio system can transmit immersive sound with additional front and rear height speaker channels improving today’s surround sound broadcasts and streams to provide a truly realistic and immersive feeling on par with the latest cinema sound systems.

The immersive experience can also be played back with devices such as 3D soundbars and headphones with binauralization technology. A single immersive mix is created and delivered to the receiving device, where it is optimized for the individual listening situation, be it stereo, surround, or immersive. This enables most consumers to enjoy high-quality immersive audio without having to add new speakers to their existing setup.

Universal Delivery

Regardless of the device, the MPEG-H Audio system delivers the best sound experience possible – in the home theatre as well as on smartphones, tablets, and Virtual Reality devices. The built-in decoder of the receiving device renders the content to the capabilities of the connected playback devices. There is no need for complicated selection or setup processes to find the content version which best works for the device. Only one MPEG-H stream is delivered by a streaming or broadcast platform to all kinds of receiver and playback devices, from headphones to sound bars and discrete loudspeaker systems. The receiving device automatically renders the audio to match the capabilities of the playback setup.