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.
The standard for 5.1 sound, Dolby Digital (also known as AC-3) is used in movie theaters, DVDs, and some game consoles. However, the codec used for AC-3 is not as efficient as more modern codecs used to compress music on computers. For several years now, various companies involved in the development of compression codecs have been working on combining these codecs with 5.1-channel audio to create a new sound standard.
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.
