Digital Home Thoughts: Ars Technica: MPEG Surround Compresses 5.1 Audio Further

"Anyone who owns a nice home theater setup (or has friends who do) has experienced the immersion of 5.1 surround sound. The combination of two forward stereo speakers, a center speaker, two rear speakers, and a subwoofer provide a depth of sound that can convincingly simulate a three-dimensional environment... Last year, the Fraunhofer company in Germany demonstrated MP3 Surround, and even released an MP3 Surround portable player to go with it. Now a consortium of companies, including Fraunhofer, Agere Systems Inc., Coding Technologies GmbH, and Philips Applied Technologies, have taken the idea a step further with a new standard called MPEG Surround. The technology, which adds the MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Codec (AAC) and MPEG-4 HE AAC (also known as aacPlus) to the list of supported codecs, was demonstrated this week at the Audio Engineering Society Expo in Paris, France."



I find this very exciting news, although I'm not clear how MPEG Surround actually differs from MP3 Surround. It's also unclear if this format translates into something like an MP3 file, but I'm hoping so. I could see future digital audio players having 3 3.5mm jacks to connect a 5.1 speaker system to. It seems like a natural evolution of the species, considering how they all tout their players as something to connect to home stereo systems [when do we get to stop calling them 'stereo systems'?]. You can read more information about MPEG Surround here, though it's pretty dry stuff and mostly technical jargon at the moment. :wink: It's set to become a draft standard this July.