For decades, German sport on television has been associated with one program above all others – Sportschau, the weekend sports roundup produced by West German Broadcasting (Westdeutsche Rundfunk, or WDR) and broadcast on the main German public-service terrestrial channel ARD.
As the Winter Olympics opened in Vancouver and German public-service TV channels began their long-planned transition to high-definition broadcasting, Sportschau moved to a new timeslot and began transmission in high-definition with 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound.
WDR needed to ensure that the whole of Sportschau could be broadcast with a 5.1 surround soundtrack every week, even when older or archive material with a stereo soundtrack was due to be included – a considerable technical challenge.
Many viewers find it jarring when a stereo segment is broadcast in the midst of a modern high-definition transmission which otherwise features a full 5.1 soundtrack as the stereo seems extremely ‘flat’ by comparison. After much testing of ways to up-mix stereo to surround, WDR chose the SoundField UPM-1 Stereo-to-5.1 processors for the task.
Markus Bozzetti is the sound engineer at WDR who was responsible for creating a workable 5.1 audio broadcast workflow for Sportschau in high-definition.
Asked which UPM-1 features proved decisive in WDR’s decision to adopt SoundField’s upmix processor, Bozzetti is unequivocal. “The UPM-1 is just such a handy sound design tool for mixing stereo material into a multi-channel, surround environment,” he explains. “It was also particularly important to us that stereo-derived upmixed multi-channel material created in the UPM-1 would downmix well if necessary, without phase problems.
