AES British Section lectures - June 2008
MPEG Surround and More - High-Quality Surround Sound For A Bandlimited World
Cornelia Falch, Fraunhofer IIS
One of the most remarkable innovations in low bitrate audio coding during the recent years was the arrival of "Spatial Audio Coding" (SAC) technology. Exploiting the human perception of spatial sound, these coding schemes are capable of transmitting high quality surround sound using bitrates that have been used for carrying traditional two-channel stereo audio so far. Moreover, these technologies can be implemented in a perfectly backward compatible way such that surround transmission is introduced into existing transmission systems (e.g. Digital Audio Broadcasting or Internet music download and streaming) without existing stereo listeners even noticing.
The talk will describe the technology behind the recently finalized MPEG Surround specification, describe its capabilities and subjective sound quality. A follow-up ISO/MPEG standardization activity for efficient and backward compatible coding of sound objects is introduced. On the receiving side, such a "Spatial Audio Object Coding" (SAOC) system renders the objects interactively into a sound scene on a reproduction setup of choice.
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