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Technology Stocks : e.Digital Corporation(EDIG) - Embedded Digital Technology -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: R. Bond who wrote (2913)	4/23/1999 7:36:00 AM
From: Tinroad	Respond to of 18366

New PR Lucent Pushes Alternative To MP3 April 23, 1999 02:30 AM PDT Lucent Technologies [NYSE:LU] is working with e.Digital [OTC:EDIG] to create a player for downloadable music that the firm hopes will compete successfully with the now popular MP3 downloadable music format. The new players will use digital signal processors (DSPs) made by Texas Instruments [NYSE:TXN] and an audio coding system based on a compression system originally developed by Bell Labs. The Lucent compression system is called the Enhanced Perceptual Audio Coder (EPAC). If EPAC players take off commercially, it will be a triumph for the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), the worldwide recording industry's effort to develop an open but secure access system for digital music. Lucent's New Ventures Group was a founding member of the trade group, which has criticized MP3 as not providing adequate protection for copyrighted digital material like music. Lucent Director of Audio Initiative for the New Ventures Group Rachel Walkden told Newsbytes there are multiple reasons for consumers to prefer EPAC to MP3 files. "It is basically a better codec (compression decompression system)," she said. "EPAC at 80 kilobits-per-second (kbps) is at least as good as MP3 at 128 kbps. So you can get the same quality for a third less space and a third less time to download." About the built-in digital security, Walkden said, "Once the labels and RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) are happy there is an architecture to protect their content, the anticipation is that they will start to release music for marketing on the Internet. The Internet will be another channel." She added, "The consumer will be able to get better content on widely available Web sites much more easily than they currently can with MP3. Finding MP3 files is not the easiest thing in the world. It's not a pleasant consumer experience. If they could go to a few areas and download music files there, and know they are doing it legally, that will be a plus." Fred Falk, CEO of e.Digital, described the sound quality produced by the EPAC coding system as "exceptional." Declared Falk, "We know what people want in an Internet music download player; great sound in a compact device that's robust and well-priced." The player itself is still under development, but Walkden says Lucent does have a protype in operation. E.Digital will make the new device, which will use the firm's patented MicroOS file management system. For signal processing, the device will use what the firms describe as a new class of DSP developed by TI. The Lucent EPAC decoder has been ported to the TI chip already. TI plans to support other codecs later, in order to establish the chip as a market standard, Walkden said. MP3 files are highly compressed versions of standard CD audio recordings that fit about 10 times more music into the same amount of storage. The best known current MP3 player is Diamond Multimedia's Rio PMP300. EPAC is a new version of the Perceptual Audio Coder on which MP3 was based. It was developed by Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies. The enhanced version, EPAC, provides CD-transparent stereo sound quality at 128 kbps sampling rate, a rate at which MP3 sound is still somewhat degraded. To create the transparent quality, EPAC uses psychoacoustic modeling of how humans hear sound. David Bikle of Lucent told Newsbytes the technology behind the EPAC player is now in the hands of Lucent's New Ventures Group and may become a fully budgeted venture in its own right if all works well with the product launch. If it is launched, the new venture will be one of four or five new ventures the Lucent group currently launches in a typical year. "It's partly a matter of timing," said Bikle. "It's not fully decided yet." Reported by Newsbytes News Network, newsbytes.com