MPEG-H Audio—The New Standard for Universal Spatial/3D Audio Coding
Jürgen Herre, et al · Journal of the Audio Engineering Society · 2015
Recently, a new generation of spatial audio formats were introduced that include elevated loudspeakers and surpass traditional surround sound formats, such as 5.1, in terms of spatial realism. To facilitate high-quality bit-rate-efficient distribution and flexible reproduction of 3D sound, the MPEG standardization group recently started the MPEG-H Audio Coding development for the universal carriage of encoded 3D sound from channel-based, object-based, and HOA-based input. High quality reproduction is supported for many output formats from 22.2 and beyond down to 5.1, stereo, and binaural reproduction-independently of the original encoding format-thus overcoming incompatibility between various 3D formats. The paper describes the current status of the standardization project and provides an overview of the system architecture, its capabilities, and performance.