Audio Signal Processing and Coding

11.3 DVD-AUDIO

The DVD Forum Committee recommended standardizing the DVD-A specifications [DVD01] and the related coding techniques for DVD-A, i.e., the Meridian lossless packing [DVD99]. DVD-A offers two important features, i.e., multiple sampling rates (44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4, and 192 kHz) and multiple bit-resolutions (16-, 20-, and 24-bit). The DVD-A format can store up to 6 channels of digital media at 24-bit resolution sampled at 96 kHz. Table 11.2 lists some of the important parameters of the DVD-A format. DVD-A provides a dynamic range of the order of 144 dB over a 96-kHz frequency range; and the maximum input data rate allowed is 9.6 Mb/s. Along with these features DVD-A addresses the digital content protection and copyright issues with a variety of encryption and audio watermarking technologies. A 74-min, 96-kHz, multichannel 20-bit resolution audio will require a minimum of 8.93 GB storage space (see Table 11.2). However, the maximum storage capacity offered by DVD-A is 4.7 GB. Therefore, a lossless compression is required. The Meridian lossless packing (MLP) scheme [Gerz99] [Kuzu03] developed by Gerzon et al. has been chosen as the compression standard for the DVD-Audio format.

Figure 11.7. Lossless audio coding using IntMDCT algorithm.

11.3.1 Meridian Lossless Packing (MLP)

The MLP encoding scheme [Gerz99] was built around the work done by Craven and Gerzon [Crav96] ...