SAMSUNG My-mp200 Referenc Information

8. Referenc Information

MPEG Audio Layer-3

History Quality Details

History

In 1987, the IIS started to work on perceptual audio coding in the framework of the EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB). In a joint cooperation with the University of Erlangen (Prof. Dieter Seitzer), the IIS finally devised a very powerful algorithm that is standardized as ISO-MPEG Audio Layer-3 (IS 11172-3 and IS 13818-3).

Without data reduction, digital audio signals typically consist of 16 bit samples recorded at a sampling rate more than twice the actual audio bandwidth (e.g. 44.1 kHz for Compact Disks). So you end up with more than 1.400 Mbit to represent just one second of stereo music in CD quality. By using MPEG audio coding, you may shrink down the original sound data from a CD by a factor of 12, without losing sound quality. Factors of 24 and even more still maintain a sound quality that is significantly better than what you get by just reducing the sampling rate and the resolution of your samples. Basically, this is realized by perceptual coding techniques addressing the perception of sound waves by the human ear.

Using MPEG audio, one may achieve a typical data reduction of

1:4	by Layer 1	(corresponds with 384 kbps for a stereo signal),
1:6...1:8	by Layer 2	(corresponds with 256..192 kbps for a stereo signal),
1:10...1:12	by Layer 3	(corresponds with 128..112 kbps for a stereo signal),

still maintaining the original CD sound quality.

By exploiting stereo effects and by limiting the audio bandwidth, the coding schemes may achieve an acceptable sound quality at even lower bitrates. MPEG Layer-3 is the most powerful member of the MPEG audio coding family. For a given sound quality level, it requires the lowest bitrate - or for a given bitrate, it achieves the highest sound quality.

Sound Quality

Some typical performance data of MPEG Layer-3 are:

sound quality	bandwidth	mode	bitrate	reduction ratio
telephone sound	2.5 kHz	mono	8 kbps *	96:1
better than shortwave	4.5 kHz	mono	16 kbps	48:1
better than AM radio	7.5 kHz	mono	32 kbps	24:1
similar to FM radio	11 kHz	stereo	56...64 kbps	26...24:1
near-CD	15 kHz	stereo	96 kbps	16:1
CD	>15 kHz	stereo	112..128kbps	14..12:1

*) Fraunhofer uses a non-ISO extension of MPEG Layer-3 for enhanced performance (“MPEG 2.5”)

In all international listening tests, MPEG Layer-3 impressively proved its superior performance, maintaining the original sound quality at a data reduction of 1:12 (around 64 kbit/s per audio channel). If applications may tolerate a limited bandwidth of around 10 kHz, a reasonable sound quality for stereo signals can be achieved even at a reduction of 1:24.

For the use of low bit-rate audio coding schemes in broadcast applications at bitrates of 60 kbit/s per audio channel, the ITU-R recommends MPEG Layer-3. (ITU-R doc. BS.1115)

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Reference Information

Details

Filter bank

The filter bank used in MPEG Layer-3 is a hybrid filter bank which consists of a polyphase filter bank and a Modified Discrete Cosine Transform (MDCT). This hybrid form was chosen for reasons of compatibility to its predecessors, Layer-1 und Layer-2.

Perceptual Model

The perceptual model is mainly determining the quality of a given encoder implementation. It uses either a seperate filter bank or combines the calculation of energy values (for the masking calculations) and the main filter bank. The output of the perceptual model consists of values for the masking threshold or the allowed noise for each coder partition. If the quantization noise can be kept below the masking threshold, then the compression results should be indistinguishable from the original signal.

Joint Stereo

Joint stereo coding takes advatage of the fact that both channels of a stereo channel pair contain far the same information. These stereophonic irrelevancies and redundancies are exploited to reduce the total bitrate. Joint stereo is used in cases where only low bitrates are available but stereo signals are desired.

Quantization and Coding

A system of two nested iteration loops is the common solution for quantization and coding in a Layer-3 encoder.

Quantization is done via a power-law quantizer. In this way, larger values are automatically coded with less accuracy and some noise shaping is already built into the quantization process.

The quantized values are coded by Huffman coding. As a specific method for entropy coding, hufman coding is lossless. Thus is called noiseless coding because no noise is added to the audio signal.

The process to find the optimum gain and scalefactors for a given block, bit-rate and output from the perceptual model is usually done by two nested iteration loops in an analysis-by-synthesis way:

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