Linear Acoustic

Linear Acoustic was founded in 2001 with the introduction of the OCTiMAX 5.1 audio processor. With the onset of digital television came myriad problems involving loudness and digital audio control. Linear Acoustic turned their attentions to solving these problems at every stage of the digital audio chain and soon developed a product range that made digital broadcast sound and work as it should.

Audio over IP (AoIP) has been embraced by the radio side of broadcasting for many years where the many advantages of networked audio via the Livewire+ AES67 standard are well known. Now, AoIP is available for television audio thanks to Linear Acoustic AERO.8000. An AoIP interface such as the Telos Alliance SDI xNode is employed to de-embed two separate HD/SD-SDI inputs, convert the signal to up to 16 channels of Livewire+ AES67 audio, and make it available for processing, upmixing, and transcoding in the AERO.8000 processing engine. The audio is then re-embedded into two independent SDI outputs, providing unmatched flexibility, scalability, and channel density.

In 2010, Linear received a Technical Emmy® for "The Pioneering Development of an Audio/Metadata Processor for Conforming Audio to the ATSC Standard," and has provided upmixing, loudness metering, encoding products, and technical support for NBC’s coverage of the 2008 Bejing Summer Games, the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games, the London 2012 Summer Games, the 2014 Sochi Winter Games, the 2016 Summer games in Rio, and most recently, the 2018 Winter Games in PyeongChang.

Minnetonka Audio and Linear Acoustic are both part of the foundation of the TV Solutions Group of the Telos Alliance