I don't know about the others, but Mark Decker passed away, sadly.
That was the end of the Archers in surround.
I finally stopped using UHJ because the amount of people that had an
Ambisonic decoder in Finland were less than you can count with your fingers.
I knew them all and I could have as well sent them a cassette instead of
just
letting them know about the transmission time on the radio.
I also made some radio plays with Dolby Surround and tested both UHJ and
Dolby Surround encoding with the DAB encoders and decoders. Dolby
Surround proved to be worse with DAB than UHJ, as the encoding parameters
that most broadcasters use, rip off almost all surround information from the
encoded signal. The bitrate per programme service is very low, so Joint
Stereo
mode is commonly used. Joint stereo looks for large phase differences and
simply removes them from the signal. As you know, in Dolby Surround the rear
channel information is encoded with a 180 degrees phase difference between
the channels. In UHJ the largest phase difference caused by the UHJ encoding
is 110 degrees, so more spatial information is preserved.
FM radio is a much better carrier for matrixed surround sound such as Dolby
Surround or Ambisonics UHJ than low bitrate DAB.
We also made a series of seven radio plays and transmitted it both in UHJ on
FM and as an on-demand stream in the Web using Windows Media Audio 9.
The WMA stream was 5.1. That was good quality, as we could use 384 kbit/s.
I don't know the very exact situation at the moment about surround sound in
radio broadcasting, but several broadcasters in Germany produce and
broadcast
5.1 Dolby Digital through satellite. ORF was a pioneer and has had 5.1
transmissions for a long time.
Proper quality Dolby Digital 5.1 needs so much bitrate that it is not
practical to
transmit it through terrestrial DAB networks.
TV broadcast audio in 5.1 starts to be a standard.
Norwegian NRK still has something at their website, but pay attention to
the date
of the last update:
http://www.nrk.no/kanal/flerkanal/5726226.html
Eero
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