Sonic Solutions

Other

Intel Corporation

Lucasfilm Ltd.

Snk Tech Investment L.l.c.

James A Moorer

Alan J McPherson

Richard L Maliszewski

Brendan Traw

George H Lydecker

David P Anderson

Some embodiments provides a highly directional audio response that is flat over five octaves or more by the use of multiple colinear arrays followed by signal processing. Each of the colinear arrays has a common center, but a different spacing so that it can be used for a different frequency range. The response of the microphones for each spacing are combined and filtered so that when the filtered responses are added, the combined response is flat over the selected frequency range. To improve the response, the output of the microphones for a given array spacing can also be filtered with windowing functions. To receive the response from other directions a 'steering' delay may also be introduced in the microphone signals before they are combined. Some embodiments can also extend to two and three dimensional arrays.

Ultra-directional microphones

Techniques of making a recording of or transmitting a sound field from either multiple monaural or directional sound signals that reproduce through multiple discrete loud speakers a sound field with spatial harmonics that substantially exactly match those of the original sound field. Monaural sound sources are positioned during mastering to use contributions of all speaker channels in order to preserve the spatial harmonics. If a particular arrangement of speakers is different than what is assumed during mastering, the speaker signals are rematrixed at the home, theater or other sound reproduction location so that the spatial harmonics of the sound field reproduced by the different speaker arrangement match those of the original sound field. An alternative includes recording or transmitting directional microphone signals, or their spatial harmonic components, and then matrixing these signals at the sound reproduction location in a manner that takes into account the specific speaker arrangement. The techniques are described for both a two dimensional sound field and the more general three dimensional case, the latter based upon using spherical harmonics.

Multi-channel surround sound mastering and reproduction techniques that preserve spatial harmonics in three dimensions

The present invention provides a highly directional audio response that is flat over five octaves or more by the use of multiple colinear arrays followed by signal processing. Each of the colinear arrays has a common center, but a different spacing so that it can be used for a different frequency range. The response of the microphones for each spacing are combined and filtered so that when the filtered responses are added, the combined response is flat over the selected frequency range. To improve the response, the output of the microphones for a given array spacing can also be filtered with windowing functions. To receive the response from other directions a 'steering' delay may also be introduced in the microphone signals before they are combined. The invention also extends to two and three dimensional arrays.

The present invention presents a way to augment the playback of a compact disk by increasing the resolution, the number of channel, or both during reproduction, while still allowing the resultant CD to be playable on a standard CD player. From a high quality original master or other source, it produces a set of conventional two track audio signals and a set of residual or additional audio data derived from the original master using this conventional stereo audio signal. Additionally, it extracts a set of control information relating this additional audio data to the conventional stereo signals. This additional audio data contains information from the original master that would otherwise be lost when encoded onto a conventional CD. Upon playback, the control information allows the additional audio data to be recombined with the conventional stereo signal in order to reconstruct the original master. A single CD embodiment places the conventional stereo tracks in the audio portion of a compact disk, with the residual or additional audio data and control information stored in the CD-ROM portion of the same disk. The described techniques extend to more general embodiments, since once the original signal is separated into a conventional stereo portion and the additional information, these may be delivered and stored independently in media other than a CD, with the conventional stereo portion usable by itself and only recombined with the additional information when augmented playback is desired.

CD playback augmentation for higher resolution and multi-channel sound

Playback of digital multimedia content by a player application may be modified according to title specific parameters. The method includes accessing the digital multimedia content, accessing title specific parameters associated with the digital multimedia content, and processing the digital multimedia content to render the content to a user according to the title specific parameters. The title specific parameters may be stored with the digital multimedia content on a removable storage medium such as a digital versatile disk (DVD) or received from a source over a computer network, satellite, or cable. The title specific parameters may be used to modify at least one of the decoding, decompressing, and downsampling of at least one track or title of the content. In one embodiment, the content is digital audio data in the DVD-Audio format.

Method and apparatus for multimedia playback with title specific parameters

Techniques of making a recording of or transmitting a sound field from either multiple monaural or directional sound signals that reproduce through multiple discrete loud speakers a sound field with spatial harmonics that substantially exactly match those of the original sound field. Monaural sound sources are positioned during mastering to use contributions of all speaker channels in order to preserve the spatial harmonics. If a particular arrangement of speakers is different than what is assumed during mastering, the speaker signals are rematrixed at the home, theater or other sound reproduction location so that the spatial harmonics of the sound field reproduced by the different speaker arrangement match those of the original sound field. An alternative includes recording or transmitting directional microphone signals, or their spatial harmonic components, and then matrixing these signals at the sound reproduction location in a manner that takes into account the specific speaker arrangement.

Multi-channel surround sound mastering and reproduction techniques that

A distributed file system with dedicated nodes capable of being connected to workstations at their bus. The system uses a complementary client-side and server-side file caching method that increases parallelism by issuing multiple server requests to keep the hardware devices busy simultaneously. Most of the node memory is used for file caching and input/output (I/O) device buffering using dynamic memory organization, reservation and allocation methods for competing memory-intensive activities.

Method of dynamically allocating network node memory's partitions for

One or more high speed programmable digital signal processors, particularly for audio processing such as mixing, sound effects and synthesizing, are supported by one or more slower speed computers that provide timed and untimed update commands to the high speed processors. Untimed commands are originated as by real-time operator gestures. Timed commands are originated by a master support computer. A queue of update commands is maintained in the high speed processor such that untimed commands are placed at the head of the queue for immediate execution and timed commands are placed at the end of the list. New timed commands are interleaved in time order with timed commands already in the queue.

Growing community of inventors

San Rafael, CA, United States of America

James A Moorer