INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION FOR STANDARDISATION
ORGANISATION INTERNATIONALE DE NORMALISATION
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11
CODING OF MOVING PICTURES AND AUDIO
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11
MPEG97/N1980 (Audio)
Feb 1998/San Jose
Source: Audio Subgroup
Title: Audio Press Release of the 42nd MPEG Meeting
Continuing its work aimed at proving the viability of the MPEG Standards, MPEG members reported detailed tests on Stereo Audio MPEG-2 AAC coders working to the Main, Low-complexity and Scalable Sample Rate Profiles. These represented the culmination of a period of International co-operation to demonstrate the achievements of the AAC developers.
The tests were conducted according to the most stringent requirements of the ITU-R Recommendation BS-1116 test methodology at the Research Laboratories of NHK in Tokyo. In total, eight combinations of bitrate and codec were assessed using 10 specifically critical programme items and 31 listeners. Rigorous statistical procedures were invoked in order to ensure that only fully justifiable conclusions were drawn from the test data. The full report of these tests is given in document WG11/N2006 and shows that the AAC main and low complexity profiles are able to demonstrate full broadcast quality at 128 kbit/s for stereo, i.e. approximately half the bitrate of that needed by the earlier MPEG-1 Layer II codec, included in these tests as a direct comparison.
In 1993, MPEG had set itself the target of achieving high quality audio at a bitrate of 64 kbit/s per channel. This has now been successfully achieved, representing the successful culmination of a significant amount of work, with tremendous international collaboration.
A web page specific to MPEG Audio matters has been established. In the four weeks since it was made public it is already proving to be very popular. The URL of the MPEG Audio Web Page is:
Heiko Purnhagen 16-Feb-1998