The 77th National High School Baseball Invitational Tournament televised in
SRS Circle Surround 5.1 (CS).
SRS Labs, Inc. and Mainichi Broadcasting System Inc.
(MBS), a terrestrial TV broadcasting company in Japan, announced that that they will
televise the highly-anticipated 77th National High School Baseball Invitational Tournament in
SRS Circle Surround 5.1 (CS).
The invitational will also be broadcast through GAORA, a
communication satellite broadcasting station. This marks the first time a Japanese
television-broadcasting studio will encode SRS Circle Surround 5.1 into their broadcast chain.
When CS is used for live sports programming, broadcasters can transmit the audio sensation
of the live event directly to the home by using industry-standard stereo broadcasting as a
carrier for surround sound. The patented CS technology allows professional audio engineers to
encode up to 6.1 channels of discrete audio for distribution or broadcast over existing
two-channel carriers such as SD and HD television, analog and digital radio, streaming media,
CDs and VHS tapes.
All 32 matches of the 77th National High School Baseball Championship, which kicks off
March 23, will be relayed by GAORA via the communications satellite broadcasting system,
and the semi-final and the final matches of the tournament will be broadcast in both
conventional terrestrial TV broadcasting with the SRS Circle Surround System, and to the
terrestrial digital TV broadcasting with the 5.1channel discrete surround system.
"As a result of our various experiments, I have verified that SRS Circle Surround has proved to
be highly compatible with stereo broadcasting," said Mr. Makoto Sugimoto, chief mixer,
Production Technical Center, MBS. "Circle Surround made it possible for us to deliver 5.1
surround sound exactly as we anticipated. We are satisfied with its quality of providing an
immersive surround sound experience to many audiences."
An important benefit of Circle Surround for production engineers and networks is the fact that
CS encoding is backward compatible with all audio formats, including mono, stereo, and other
surround sound systems. This flexibility means that CS-encoded programming is compatible
with any playback system a viewer may own, from a television?s standard internal speakers to
a full home theater installation with multiple speakers. However, for the ultimate experience in
surround sound playback, it is recommended that home theater enthusiasts use a surround
sound receiver that includes Circle Surround II decoding, available from manufacturers such as
Marantz, Accuphase, Pioneer, Theta Digital, Motorola and Kenwood.