MPEG (Moving Pictures Expert Group) has finalised the standardisations process of the MPEG Surround technique, with the new multi-channel audio compression technique now ready for deployment.

Developed by four parties (Agere Systems, Coding Technologies, Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated
Circuits IIS and Philips Applied Technologies) MPEG Surround is an open standard compression technique for multi-channel audio signals.

Designed specifically for portable applications, the system provides spatial rendering and a reproduction of multi-channel audio on stereo headphones.

It operates on top of any core audio codec such as AAC, HE-AAC and MPEG-1 Layer II, and provides features including full backward compatibility to stereo equipment and a wide scalability in terms of bit rate used for describing the surround sound image.

In combination with HE-AAC, MPEG Surround can carry a five or seven channel surround program at a total bit rate of 64 kb/s or less.

MPEG Surround is currently being demonstrated at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona.