信息科学与电子工程专业英语教学课件.ppt

Technical English For Information Science and Electronic Engineering Unit 10 Digital Audio Compression Part I MPEG Audio Layer 3 New Words New Words 1 With the advent of the Internet, there is a desire for more and more information to be transmitted across phone lines. Audio information is one form that is increasingly downloaded, be it a sampler for a band’s album, a radio program, or sound as part of a video.1 As bandwidth in a telephone wire is limited, this has led to a need for information (including audio) to be compressed. 2 The traditional method of storing digital audio, used in CDs and digital TV, samples the amplitude of the sound a set number of times per second, and records this.2 2 The precision of the amplitude is determined by the number of bits used to store the amplitude. So the bandwidth (or memory) consumed by the audio signal is dependent on three factors: the number of samples taken per second (Frequency), the number of bits used to store the amplitude (Bit Depth) and the length of the signal (Time). 2 When we know these three things, the memory used becomes simple to calculate: Memory = Frequency ? Bit Depth ? Time. Additionally, if the signal is in stereo, then this must be doubled as two signals are in fact used. 3 This equation can be used to demonstrate why transmitting high-quality audio across the Internet requires compression. CD audio uses 16-bit stereo sampled at 44,100 Hz. This means that one minute of CD audio uses 44,100?16?60?2 = 84,672,000 bits, or slightly over 10 megabytes. 3 A standard 56 kbps modem would take 84,672,000/57344 = 1477 seconds or about 25 minutes! 25 minutes is a long time to wait for one minute of audio, so an alternative is imperative. That alternative was MPEG Audio Layer 3, or MP3. 4 The codec The human ear can only hear a limited range of frequencies. The codec therefore removes all sounds outside this range, as they will not be heard anyway. 5 A psycho-acoustic model is then applied to the sound.