New Standards for Speech and Audio Coding

In the past two years the maturity of new speech and audio coding technologies has been demonstrated. Several `contests` to determine digital speech coding standards for new products and services have either been resolved or are near resolution. And another contest is under way to determine a wideband audio coding standard as well. One of the requirements for each of these `contests` was to demonstrate either working hardware implementations or to show that the complexity of the proposed coder would allow its implementation on one or two current-generation Digital Signal Processing chips in order to insure that the new product or service would be available commercially within one to two years.