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Paris - Dolby Laboratories may no longer have a lock on the multichannel-audio market, thanks to the emergence of a new surround-sound technology that stole the limelight at the Audio Engineering Society (AES) Expo here last week. MPEG Surround allows broadcasters or content owners to add high-quality surround sound, with very little overhead in bandwidth, to MP3 files or other MPEG audio streams for Internet Protocol TV, mobile entertainment and Internet streaming applications, proponents said.
MPEG Surround, which is scheduled to become a Final Draft International Standard in July, is a very efficient parametric coding technology. It essentially reduces bit-rate requirements for high-quality multichannel audio compression while maintaining backward compatibility with existing stereo equipment.
Now proponents say it's up to chip makers to step in with the devices needed to bring the new audio technology to market.
While details on intellectual-property rights for MPEG Surround are still being worked at, "they will be made available in a fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory manner," said Bernhard Grill, head of the audio department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS.
The technology can transform mono or stereo audio...