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Spectral band replication

 

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Spectral band replication


 
 

Spectral band replication (SBR) is a technology to enhance audio or speech codecs, especially at low bit rates and is based on harmonic redundancy in the frequency domain.

It can be combined with any audio compression codec: the codec itself transmits the lower and midfrequencies of the spectrum, while SBR replicates higher frequency content by transposing up harmonics from the lower and midfrequencies at the decoder. Some guidance information for reconstruction of the high-frequency spectral envelope is transmitted as side information.

When needed, it also reconstructs or adaptively mixes in noise-like information in selected frequency bands in order to faithfully replicate signals that originally contained none or less tonal components.

The beauty of the SBR idea is based on the principle that the psychoacoustic part of the human brain tends to analyse higher frequencies with less accuracy, thus harmonic phenomena associated with the spectral band replication process needs only be accurate in a perceptual sense and not technically or mathematically exact.

Psychoacoustical codecs using SBR

SBR has been combined with AACAdvanced Audio Coding

Advanced Audio Coding is a standardised, lossy digital audio compression scheme....
 to create MPEG-4MPEG-4

MPEG-4 is a standard used primarily to compress audio and video digital data....
 High Efficiency AAC, with MP3MP3

MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a popular digital audio encoding and lossy compression form...
 to create mp3PROMp3PRO

mp3PRO is an audio compression algorithm that combines the MP3 audio format with spectral band replication compression metho...
, and with MPEG-1 Layer II (MP2).

It is used in broadcast systems like Digital Radio MondialeDigital Radio Mondiale

Digital Radio Mondiale is firstly an international non-profit consortium bound by a consortium agreement and committed to de...
 (DRM+, not DRM), HD RadioHD Radio

HD Radio is iBiquity's brand of digital radio technology for transmission and reception of sound that has been digitized and...
, and XM Satellite RadioXM Satellite Radio

XM Satellite Radio Holdings is one of two satellite radio services in the United States and Canada, along with Sirius Radio....
.

If the player is not capable of using the side information that has been transmitted alongside the "normal" compressed audio data, it may still be able to play the "baseband" data as usual, resulting in a dull (since the high frequencies are missing), but otherwise mostly acceptable sound. This is for example the case if a mp3PRO is played back with an mp3 software incapable of utilizing the side information.





See also

  • Perceptual Audio CodingPerceptual Audio Coding

    Perceptual Audio Coding is an algorithm, like MPEG's MP3 standard, used to compress digital audio by removing extraneous inf...


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