American viewers tuning into the first digital television broadcasts due this autumn can expect the full home cinema experience – crisp picture quality and stereo surround sound. But in Europe the same high quality DTV visuals could be accompanied by sound more akin to a bee buzzing around in a tin can. The New Scientist reports the first wave of digital receivers do not support the Moving Pictures Experts Group MPEG-2 European multichannel sound standard, and broadcasters aren’t planning to broadcast multi-channel sound. So, instead of the six channels of sound offered by the American Dolby Digital system (and theoretically the MPEG-2 standard), consumers will by aurally assaulted by two channels of sound not even comparable to the Nicam system offered on current analog stereo TV sets. The commercial pressures on operators such as British Digital Broadcasting Plc to pump out as many channels as possible using the smallest amount of bandwidth means that they may well choose to use MPEG-2 ‘joint stereo’ option, which only broadcasts ‘common’ sounds from both sides of the stereo ‘picture’, cutting the transmission rate required to 192kbs per second. However, the report says that trials held by the British Broadcasting Corporation found that when compared with the MPEG-2 256kbs per second ‘true’ stereo standard, the ‘joint’ standard offered an inferior quality of sound.
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