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Fraunhofer's Full-HD Voice brings high fidelity VoLTE to Android smartphones
The audio nerds at Fraunhofer are set to raise the bar for Voice over LTE next week in Barcelona, as the company has announced a new technology known as Full-HD Voice. By leveraging the AAC-ELD codec, Fraunhofer claims that consumers will experience audio quality that rivals the experience of chatting face-to-face. Technically speaking, it's said the codec offers four times the audio bandwidth of regular phone calls and twice the bandwidth of HD voice services, all without an increase in bit rate. The technology will only be available for Android phones initially, but that seems like a fine place to start. The full PR is after the break -- presented in Full HD, of course.
Fraunhofer IIS to push MPEG Surround as next big downloadable audio format
Watch out, MP3 -- you've got a formidable opponent creeping up on you. All kidding aside (yes, we were kidding), Fraunhofer IIS is hoping that at least four people will turn from their MP3 / AAC addictions and embrace yet another one of its audio formats at CES, which is simply christened MPEG Surround. Harald Popp, head of the Multimedia Realtime Systems department at the company, has asserted that the firm believes that "MPEG Surround will become a major online distribution format when downloading music, movie and TV content," noting that it offers "the music industry a way to sell iPod-compatible surround content through the existing stereo download infrastructure." We suppose the multi-channel aspect is at least somewhat noteworthy, but we still see a hard road ahead for it to gain "global acceptance" in 2009.
Fraunhofer says HD-ACC will make CDs "obsolete"
Those Fraunhofer folks are nothing if not prolific, and it now looks like they're getting a little boastful as well, as evidenced by some comments reps from the group made at CES this week. As MacWorld reports, Fraunhofer IIS is not only saying that its new HD-ACC codec is "better than CD," but that it "makes CDs obsolete." That is apparently due to the codec's lossless compression of 24-bit music content, as opposed to the 16-bit, 44.1 kHz quality now found on CDs. What's more, the HD-AAC encoding process embeds a so-called "core layer" on any device that supports plain old AACs, although you'll obviously need a player with an HD-AAC decoder in order to take advantage of the fully lossless signal. Of course, some formats have a tendency to take off more quickly than others, so we'll just have to wait and see how HD-ACC plays out in the grander scheme of things.
