Advanced audio coding for digital sound broadcasting

Digital sound broadcasting systems are always in need for better bandwidth efficiency. The recently standardized MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding system delivers a factor of two improvement in compression efficiency over older technology like MPEG-Audio Layer-2. It has been designed for all applications needing high efficiency compression for high quality audio signals supporting mono, stereo and multi-channel material. Even more flexibility and coding modes will be available with the upcoming MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding and adds modes for low bit-rate speech coding, audio coding at very low bit-rates (down to a few kb/s) and the seamless integration of audio synthesis.