Delayless mixing - On the benefits of MPEG-4 AAC-ELD in high quality communication systems

Tele- and video conferencing systems for modern business communication are managed by central hubs, so-called multipoint control units (MCU). One major task of these units is the mixing of audio streams from the participating sites. This is traditionally done by decoding the streams, mixing in time domain and then re-encoding of the mixed signals. This requires additional processing power, leads to increased delay and degraded audio quality. It is demonstrated how the recently standardized MPEG-4 Enhanced Low Delay AAC (AAC-ELD) codec offers a solution to these problems by efficient and delayless mixing in the transform domain of the codec.