Fraunhofer IIS, the world’s renowned source for audio and multimedia technologies, will premiere Extended HE-AAC, the latest upgrade to the MPEG AAC family. Extended HEAAC significantly improves the audio quality of music and speech particularly at very low bit rates of 8 kbit/s and more, and is compatible with HE-AAC streams.

Extended HE-AAC combines the advantages of existing speech and music codecs. By adding a new set of encoding tools to the HE-AACv2 audio codec, Extended HE-AAC outperforms dedicated speech and general audio coding schemes and bridges the gap between both worlds, providing consistent high quality audio for all signal types. As a result, Extended HE-AAC can improve the quality of existing low bit rate services or more audio channels can be transmitted at a given bit rate.

ISO MPEG initiated this standardization activity in 2008, when a call for proposals on unified speech and audio coding technology was issued. In the following years, Fraunhofer IIS was one of the leading drivers of the standardization process. The new AAC generation is now presented for the first time by Fraunhofer IIS at Mobile World Congress.

For more information, visit http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/audio