Introduction to Digital Audio Coding and Standards (The Springer International Series in Engineering and Computer Scienc
Introduction to Digital Audio Coding and Standards provides a detailed introduction to the methods, implementations, and official standards of state-of-the-art audio coding technology. In the book, the theory and implementation of each of the basic coder building blocks is addressed. The building blocks are then fit together into a full coder and the reader is shown how to judge the performance of such a coder. Finally, the authors discuss the features, choices, and performance of the main state-of-the-art coders defined in the ISO/IEC MPEG and HDTV standards and in commercial use today.
The ultimate goal of this book is to present the reader with a solid enough understanding of the major issues in the theory and implementation of perceptual audio coders that they are able to build their own simple audio codec. There is no other source available where a non-professional has access to the true secrets of audio coding.
Why Read This Book
You will gain a practical, engineering-focused grounding in perceptual audio coding and the official standards that dominate real-world systems, learning both the theory and the implementation tradeoffs behind modern audio codecs. This book ties psychoacoustics, transform and subband techniques, quantization and entropy coding into full coder designs so you can evaluate, implement, or optimize real encoders/decoders.
Who Will Benefit
DSP engineers, audio codec developers, and graduate students with basic DSP knowledge who need to design, implement, or evaluate perceptual audio coders and understand ISO/IEC audio standards.
Level: Intermediate — Prerequisites: Undergraduate-level signals and systems and digital signal processing (Fourier transforms, filtering, basic probability and statistics); familiarity with discrete-time Fourier transform/FFT and linear algebra.
Key Takeaways
- Design perceptual audio coders by combining psychoacoustic models, transform/subband analysis, quantization and bit allocation, and entropy coding
- Implement time-frequency transforms and filter banks (including MDCT-based codec structures) and understand their aliasing/cancellation properties
- Apply psychoacoustic masking models to drive perceptual quantization and rate control for efficient bit allocation
- Evaluate codec performance using objective metrics and controlled subjective testing and interpret trade-offs between complexity, delay, and quality
- Map theoretical building blocks into real-world standards: read, implement, and compare MPEG audio profiles (e.g., MP3, AAC) and related commercial formats
- Assess robustness, error resilience, and practical implementation issues (complexity, buffering, delay, and encoder control strategies)
Topics Covered
- 1. Introduction to Digital Audio Coding and Historical Context
- 2. Basics of Psychoacoustics and Perceptual Masking
- 3. Time-Frequency Signal Representations: FFT, STFT and the MDCT
- 4. Filter Banks and Subband Coding
- 5. Quantization, Noise Shaping, and Perceptual Bit Allocation
- 6. Entropy Coding: Huffman and Arithmetic Techniques
- 7. Assembling Perceptual Coders: Encoder and Decoder Architectures
- 8. Standardized Audio Codecs: MPEG-1/2 Layer I–III, AAC and Related Profiles
- 9. Multichannel, Scalable and Low-Delay Coding Techniques
- 10. Error Resilience, Robustness and Transport Considerations
- 11. Objective and Subjective Evaluation of Audio Quality
- 12. Implementation Issues: Complexity, Optimization and Reference Software
- Appendices: Mathematical Background, Standard Bitstream Summaries, Reference Implementations
Languages, Platforms & Tools
How It Compares
More focused on perceptual coding and standards than Pohlmann's Principles of Digital Audio, and more applied to audio codecs than Lyons' Understanding Digital Signal Processing which emphasizes DSP fundamentals.
