What is MPEG-2 AUDIO ?
MPEG is developing the MPEG-2 Audio Standard for low bitrate coding of multichannel audio. MPEG-2 Audio coding will supply up to five full bandwidth channels (left, right, center, and two surround channels), plus an additional low frequency enhancement channel, and/or up to seven commentary/multilingual channels. The MPEG-2 Audio Standard will also extend the stereo and mono coding of the MPEG-1 Audio Standard (ISO/IEC IS 11172-3) to half sampling-rates (16 kHz, 22.05 kHz, and 24 kHz), for improved quality for bitrates at or below 64 kbits/s, per channel. MPEG produced an updated version of the MPEG-2 Audio Working Draft, and is on track for achieving a Committee Draft specification by the November MPEG meeting. The MPEG-2 Audio multichannel coding Standard will provide backward-compatibility with the existing MPEG-1 Audio Standard (ISO/IEC IS 11172-3). Together with ITU-RS, MPEG is organizing formal subjective testing of the proposed MPEG-2 multichannel audio codecs and up to three no