Monday May 3, 11:38 am Eastern Time
Company Press Release from Lucent Technologies
PHIL RAMONE NAMED AS SENIOR ADVISOR TO LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES
INTERNET MUSIC DOWNLOAD INITIATIVE
MIDDLETOWN, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 3, 1999--Lucent Technologies today announced that and technology guru Phil Ramone has been named senior advisor to the Internet music download initiative of the company's New Ventures Group. Ramone, an independent consultant, will work with Lucent to promote its Enhanced Perceptual Audio Coder (EPAC(TM)), a new version of the highest-quality audio coder, to the music industry. In the past year, he conducted a high-profile New York-to-Los Angeles Internet music demonstration of EPAC to key industry figures in October, 1998.
Phil Ramone, producer of such noted artists as Billy Joel, Barbra Streisand, and Paul Simon, and Chairman of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), has been an early adopter
of recording technology throughout his career and a pioneer in the growing Internet music industry.
''Lucent brings a wealth of technical credibility to the downloadable music industry, and I firmly hold that their solutions are second to none,'' said Ramone. ''Producers in the music industry, as well as the
average music lover, deserve the best listening experience possible when hearing music over the Internet.
Lucent helps bridge the gap between where we are today and where we need to be in order to sustain a viable, Internet music business.''
Lucent's New Ventures Group has been developing opportunities for audio technologies developed at Bell Labs, and has been working closely with the music industry to develop secure, high-quality solutions for Internet music delivery. Recently, Lucent announced a hand-held EPAC player with e.Digital that will be delivered in December, 1999. Lucent is a founding member of the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), the worldwide recording industry's effort to develop an open, secure access system for digital music.
EPAC is a new version of the Perceptual Audio Coder(TM) - developed by Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies - which is an audio compression algorithm with the highest-quality audio at the lowest bit rates. At 128 kilobits per second, EPAC offers CD-transparent stereo sound.
''Phil Ramone is a very well-respected and experienced pillar of the music industry, which is why we are so privileged to have him join us in this advisory capacity,'' said Rachel Walkden, director of audio for the Lucent New Ventures Group. ''We believe that we offer the highest-quality audio coder with the greatest levels of security, and Phil will be instrumental in helping us demonstrate these capabilities to the music industry.''
EPAC is fully compliant with the RealNetworks G2 Player, the industry's most recognized system for streaming media.
EPAC uses psychoacoustic modeling - that is, a representation of how humans hear sound - to compress music in a way that is not noticeable to the ear. Music is compressed at a rate of 11 to 1, thus reducing the transmission time/bandwidth and storage by the same ratio, while still retaining its fidelity.
Several recent improvements in EPAC have pushed its performance levels to new heights, including: EPAC's improved quantization and coding, allowing higher quality audio at lower bit rates, and EPAC's improved psychoacoustic modeling from Bell Labs research, which provides CD-transparent sound at 128 kbps.
EPAC's variable bit rates and superior audio quality allow the coder to be used in multiple bandwidth applications.
PAC was recently rated the best performing audio coding technology in a class of five tested in independent trials by Moulton Laboratories. In this test, PAC at 96 kbps outperformed the MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coder (AAC). At 96 kbps, PAC also outperformed AAC at 128 kbps based on a repeatable statistical score.
PAC is a technology which is supported across broad applications by Lucent. For example, Lucent Digital Radio (www.lucent.com/ldr), a wholly-owned venture of Lucent Technologies, will use PAC in its
In-Band On-Channel (IBOC) digital audio broadcast (DAB) system.
Lucent Technologies' famed research and development arm, Bell Labs, has been at the forefront of technology for the music industry for decades, with the introduction of sound for motion pictures in 1926;
the invention of stereo recording in 1933; the invention of the transistor in 1947; the introduction of computer-synthesized music in the 1950s; the introduction of psychoacoustics in the 1960s; sub-band
coding of audio in the 1970s; the introduction of linear predictive coding in the 1980s, and the Perceptual Audio Coder in the 1990s.
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.
Contact:
Chris Pfaff
908/582-7571 (office)
800/705-2368 (pager)
cpfaff@lucent.com
or
David Bikle
908/582-4120 (office)
dbikle@lucent.com |
