MPEG Surround Software Available for Evaluation

Agere Systems, Coding Technologies, Fraunhofer and Philips, the inventors behind the new MPEG Surround audio compression technique, will showcase their technology at AES this week.
The companies say they recently finalized the system specs under the MPEG-D standard and they await formal approval formal approval in the standards process. They expect the first independent test results of the new technology to be ready at the end of the year.
Operating on top of a core audio codec, the MPEG Surround system is backward compatibility to stereo and scalable in terms of the bit rate used for describing the surround sound image.
Software for evaluation and development is being made available to interested parties.
The four companies will jointly demo MPEG Surround in room #258 at AES.