The Lucasfilm audio signal processor

The requirements of audio processing for motion pictures present several special problems that both make digital processing of audio very desirable and relatively difficult. The difficulties can be summarized as follows: (1) Large amounts of numerical computation are required, on the order of 2 million integer multiply-adds per second per channel of audio, for some number of channels. (2) The exact processing involved changes in real time but must not interrupt the flow of audio data. (3) Large amounts of input/output capacity is necessary, simultaneous with numerical calculation and changes to the running program, on the order of 1.6 million bits per second per channel of audio. To this end, the digital audio group at Lucasfilm is building a number of audio signal processors the architecture of which reflects the special problems of audio.