Sound Design update: Richard Dean looks at the belated interest in TV audio quality, and a continuing evolution of the tools to deliver it to viewers.(special feature)

It's often been said that if you mute a television set, you end up with a flickering box that nobody takes much notice of. Keep the sound but cover the picture, and you have passable radio. Yet despite its obvious importance, audio has often been seen as the poor relation to the picture.

The prospect of making programmes in high definition is stimulating a rethink of sound's role, as all current and future HD formats specify multichannel audio. Producers are starting to realise that a lazy approach to the soundtrack severely reduces the impact of those painstakingly gathered ...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.