Monday April 12, 6:30 am Eastern Time
Company Press Release
Lucent Digital Radio Announces New Product Line Based On the Lucent Perceptual Audio Coder - PAC
WARREN, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 12, 1999--Lucent Digital Radio, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU - news), today announced the availability of new audio coders, based on the Lucent Perceptual Audio Coder(TM) (PAC(TM)), thE industry's highest-quality audio coder.
The new PAC coders, which offer transparent CD quality at 128 kilobits per second (Kb/s) and CD-like quality at 96 Kb/s, are available at a wide range of bit rates, from 16 Kb/s to 128 Kb/s. The PAC coders will be available to customers developing applications for transmission of digital audio over a variety of wireless and wireline channels.
The new PAC coders include PAC Version 1.0, which delivers digital audio transport on unimpaired channels and PAC Version 2.0, which incorporates Lucent Digital Radio's patented Multi-Streaming technology for broadcast applications over impaired channels.
''The new PAC product line allows us to deliver the most comprehensive set of digital audio coders ever available on the market,'' said Suren Pai, president of Lucent Digital Radio. ''PAC is a building-block for the next generation of digital audio. This new generation of PAC coders presents a high-quality and flexible product line for the audio industry and broadcast equipment providers.''
One application that is already using PAC is the studio link, where Audio Video Communications (AVC) has implemented PAC, operating at variable bit rates within their newest broadcasting product, the TieLine. The AVC TieLine is a bi-directional audio codec, which allows high-quality remote broadcasting over analog phone lines. Another application is within Lucent Digital Radio's In-Band On-Channel (IBOC) Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) system.
The PAC product line will take advantage of the coder's variable bit rates and superior audio quality. This means that PAC adapts, in real time, to free bandwidth for other applications. PAC is also modular and can deliver audio in 16 Kb/s increments.
''As processor speeds increase, and acceptance of new forms of audio delivery grow, PAC will become the de facto standard for perceptual audio coding,'' said Deepen Sinha, principal engineer for Lucent Digital Radio. ''This new PAC product line is several generations beyond our nearest competition and employs a number of key Bell Labs patented technologies. Bell Labs is the birthplace of perceptual audio coding, having perfected this class of audio coders over the past two decades. Now, the floodgates of the market are opening for new applications that maximize the potential of this powerful technology. Lucent Digital Radio is uniquely poised to deliver this technology to market.''
The technical components of the new PAC coder line include:
-- FilterBank - signal adaptive MDCT/wavelet transform
-- Psychoacoustic Model
-- Quantization - non-uniform vector quantization
-- Noiseless coding - adaptive Huffman coding with codebooks based on signal level and statistics
-- Efficient stereo coding - low bit-rate parametric stereo coding
PAC VERSION 1.0
PAC Version 1.0 is optimized for low bit-rate transmission of voice and music with up to 8.0 kHz audio bandwidth. The output bit rates available are between 16 Kb/s and 32 Kb/s, targeting products that transmit and receive audio over analog phone lines and other bandwidth-constrained channels.
PAC VERSION 2.0
PAC Version 2.0 is designed specifically for broadcast applications with impaired channels. Multi-Streaming technology enables high-quality reception even if audio packets are missing from the broadcast stream. PAC's Multi-Streaming technology maintains performance even under conditions of 10% Frame Error Rate (FER), ideal for digital wireless broadcast products.
Lucent Technologies and its research and development unit, Bell Laboratories, have been leaders in the digital encoding of information used in communications systems, and have been at the forefront of digital audio broadcasting (DAB) technology for the past decade.
For more information on Lucent Digital Radio, visit the Web Site at lucent.com or contact William Casey, Director, Marketing & Sales, at 908-580-7008 or email at williamcasey@lucent.com.
Lucent Technologies, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., designs, builds and delivers a wide range of public and private networks, communications systems and software, data networking systems, business telephone systems and microelectronic components. Bell Labs is the research and development arm for the company. For more information on Lucent Technologies, visit the company's web site at www.lucent.com
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