MPEG-4 Part 3 - AAC-SSR

AAC-SSR

AAC Scalable Sample Rate was introduced by Sony to the MPEG-2 Part 7 and MPEG-4 Part 3 standards. It was first published in ISO/IEC 13818-7, Part 7: Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) in 1997. The audio signal is first split into 4 bands using a 4 band polyphase quadrature filter bank. Then these 4 bands are further split using MDCTs with a size k of 32 or 256 samples. This is similar to normal AAC LC which uses MDCTs with a size k of 128 or 1024 directly on the audio signal.

The advantage of this technique is that short block switching can be done separately for every PQF band. So high frequencies can be encoded using a short block to enhance temporal resolution, low frequencies can be still encoded with high spectral resolution. However, due to aliasing between the 4 PQF bands coding efficiencies around (1,2,3) * fs/8 is worse than normal MPEG-4 AAC LC.

MPEG-4 AAC-SSR is very similar to ATRAC and ATRAC-3.

Read more about this topic:  MPEG-4 Part 3