Cobalt Digital's LMNTS Wins two Awards at NAB 2012
Cobalt Digital received double honors at NAB 2012 with awards from the broadcast industry’s leading publications. Both Broadcast Engineering and TV Technology acknowledged the ingenuity of LMNTS™ (Loudness Management for n-Transport Streams) - the manufacturer’s new multi-channel loudness processing over IP platform - with highly sought-after awards presented to only a tiny fraction of products exhibited at the show held in Las Vegas from April 16th – April 19th. NAB is the world's largest electronic media show covering filmed entertainment and the development, management and delivery of content across all mediums.
“Cobalt’s LMNTS is an exciting “first” in comprehensive transport-based 
loudness processing,” commented Chris Shaw, Cobalt’s senior vp of sales and marketing. “We are pleased that not only one, but two of our most respected publications recognized LMNTS as a quantum leap in multi-stream loudness processing. It offers broadcasters a much-needed economic, consistent solution that’s easy to integrate.“
Ideal for MVPDs and MSOs where a large number of diverse programming sources must be simultaneously controlled, LMNTS performs automatic loudness processing across many transport streams. It operates at the MPEG IP transport layer to provide a practical loudness management solution without the need or complexity of external codecs transferring between baseband and MPEG external interfaces.
Available in both IP and ASI versions, LMNTS extracts and decodes audio codec packets from the program stream, performs high-quality PCM loudness processing, and then re-encodes and re-packets the audio within its stream. Physically, all data connections to LMNTS are via GigE IP or ASI interfaces using an industry-standard IT hardware platform with no intermediary breakouts.
LMNTS is fully scalable and works with single and multi program streams, and supports all video codecs. Because it uses the same high-quality Linear Acoustic® Aeromax™ loudness processing for each stream, perfect loudness consistency is assured for all programming passing through the system.
Broadcast Engineering’s Pick Hits are among the most prestigious technical awards given at NAB. A panel of independent judges not affiliated with the magazine, tours the show floor for three days looking for innovative products and technology. The judges then met to make their selections based on several criteria, including the technical and financial improvements the product can bring to a facility’s operation. At NAB 2012, only 23 products received the final nod.
TV Technology’s STAR Awards (for Superior Technology Award Recipient) are designed to celebrate and showcase the preeminent technological innovations available to the media industry. Editors search the show floor for the most innovative technologies that demonstrate an ability to help advance the acquisition and distribution of entertainment and information across the media spectrum. Finalists were examined by a panel of broadcast industry experts and judged for their technical applications and overall contribution to the industry.