The Fraunhofer Institute, who describe themselves as “the primary inventor of the MP3 audio standard,” and Telos Systems, one of the first implementers of MP3 in a product, say they’ll show off the “next MP3,” demonstrated in an advanced ISDN codec system, at the upcoming National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) expo. NAB will be held April 21-26 in Las Vegas.
Fraunhofer and Telos modestly say that their most recent development is “an advance potentially as important as was the introduction of MP3 to the broadcast and Internet worlds seven years ago.” Their new MPEG-4 system Low Delay Advanced Audio Coding (AAC-LD), developed by the Fraunhofer Institute, will purportedly offer a breakthrough in the quality of audio transmission for telephone systems. At a data rate of 64 kbps, AAC-LD offers sound quality that is comparable to MP3, but with 80 percent lower transmission delay, according to the folks at Fraunhofer.
At NAB, Telos Systems and Fraunhofer promise to demo the “world’s first implementation of AAC-LD” in real products: the Telos Zephyr Xstream ISDN codec family. The original Zephyr was the first to use MP3. Harald Popp of Fraunhofer IIS-A and Steve Church, president of Telos, will preview AAC-LD and the new Telos Zephyr Xstream.
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