Coding Technologies, the provider of audio compression for mobile, digital broadcasting and the Internet, in concert with Beijing E-World Technology, the government- and industry-sponsored company responsible for creating the new Chinese Enhanced Versatile Disc (EVD) format, announced today that they are establishing a joint venture, Beijing Media Works, to create and license a new audio codec.

This new SBR-enhanced codec, EAC 2.0, is already specified in the EVD format and will also be targeted for use in other Chinese applications. Leveraging Coding Technologies' Spectral Band Replication (SBR) technology, the joint venture is creating an SBR-enhanced version of Beijing E-World Technology's EAC audio codec. The new combination, licensing Coding Technologies SBR and incorporating EAC, has double the performance, making it an industry-leading audio codec with a wide field of use.

Beijing Media Works is based in Beijing, with additional engineering facilities in Nuremberg, Germany. This selection of office locations will allow for close business and engineering collaboration between the joint venture and both parent companies. SBR-enhanced EAC will be licensed exclusively in Greater China by the joint venture and in the rest of the world by Coding Technologies.

SBR is a unique bandwidth-extension technique, which enables audio codecs to deliver the same quality at half the bit rate. In practice, SBR is wrapped around a core perceptual audio codec to enhance its efficiency in a backward- and forward-compatible way. Based on the principle that the high and low frequencies of an audio signal are highly correlated, SBR-coupled codecs use the core to only encode the low frequencies and use the SBR to encode the high frequencies with very low overhead. The EBU credits SBR technology as the most significant improvement in audio codec performance since 2000.

EAC is an enhanced audio codec developed and owned by Beijing E-World that uses a unique perceptual model to compress the audio signal by utilizing the redundancy as well as the relevancy. The EAC codec supports mono, stereo, and 5.1 surround-sound modes for encoding and decoding. EAC is part of the EVD system specification.