This paper proposes a lossless audio coding scheme with hierarchical scalability in terms of sampling rate and amplitude resolution. A single bit stream contains hierarchical information that can generate waveforms ranging from 96 kHz with 24-bit amplitude resolution through lower sampling/resolution lossless waveforms to a highly compressed lossy one created using an MPEG-4 audio coder. This bit stream structure enables dynamic rate control and hierarchical multicasting based on a simple priority control of the IP packets. These functions will be useful for high-quality archiving and broadband streaming for various types of networks and terminal equipment.

This paper proposes a lossless scalable audio coding scheme and quality enhancement processing at the decoder to compensate for some missing scalable units of information. The bit rate scalability is achieved by combining high-compression coding, such as MPEG-4, and horizontal bit slicing of the PCM-coded error signal between the original waveform and the locally reconstructed MPEG-4 signal. The horizontally sliced stream may be transported through an IP network with priority. Even if some units are missing at the decoder, reasonable quality waveform can be reconstructed by means of post-processing using some side information. This scheme enables graceful degradation by supporting lossless, near lossless, and high-compression coding within a single scalable framework, and is useful for narrowband to broadband audio streaming.

This paper proposes a speech and audio coder which operates at 1 bit/sample, namely an 8 kbit/s coder for 8 kHz sampling or a 16 kbit/s coder for 16 kHz sampling. The basic structure is inherited from a Twin VQ (transform domain weighted interleave vector quantization) high-quality audio coding scheme. A periodical component extraction scheme is newly added to the quantization of the MDCT coefficients. This scheme is found to be effective for reducing distortion and improving the robustness against channel errors. The qualities for music signals at 8 kbit/s are better than those of G.729 at the same bit rates, while they are worse for clean speech. The qualities at 16 kbit/s are comparable to or better than those of G.722 at 48 kbit/s.

This paper proposes two novel techniques for twinVQ (transform domain weighted interleave VQ) high-quality audio coding scheme for rates lower than 64 kbit/s. One is an extension of the weighted interleave technique to the time and input channel domains as well as the frequency domain. The other is an efficient representation scheme of the spectral envelope by means of a interpolated square root LPC (linear predictive coding) spectrum.

This paper describes the design of a speech coder called pitch synchronous innovation CELP (PSI-CELP) for low hit-rate mobile communications. PSI-CELP is based on CELP, but has more adaptive excitation structures. In voiced frames, instead of conventional random excitation vectors, PSI-CELP converts even the random excitation vectors to have pitch periodicity by repeating stored random vectors as well as by using an adaptive codebook, in silent, unvoiced, and transient frames, the coder stops using the adaptive codebook and switches to fixed random codebooks. The PSI-CELP coder also implements novel structures and techniques: an FIR-type perceptual weighting filter using unquantized LPC parameters, a random codebook with a conjugate structure trained to be robust against channel errors, codebook search with delayed decision, a gain quantization with sloped amplitude, and a moving average prediction coding of LSP parameters, Our speech coder is implemented by DSP chips. Its coded speech quality at 3.6 kb/s with 2.0 kb/s redundancy is comparable to that of the Japanese full-rate VSELP coder at 6.7 kb/s with 4.5 kb/s redundancy. The basic structure of this PSI-CELP coder has been chosen as the Japanese half-rate speech codec for digital cellular telecommunications.>

A new class D type tuned power amplifier is proposed. It can operate at a far higher frequency (above 1 MHz) than a conventional class D one. This can be realized by applying the class E switching conditions to each switch. This circuit is very similar to class D amplifier but has a shunt capacitor in each switch device. The analysis, design procedure and experimental results are given. The measured efficiency was over 96 percent at 1 MHz.>