The ISO/MPEG Unified Speech and Audio Coding Standard—Consistent High Quality for All Content Types and at All Bit Rates

In early 2012 the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 (MPEG) finalized the new MPEG-D Unified Speech and Audio Coding standard. The new codec brings together the previously separated worlds of general audio coding and speech coding. It does so by integrating elements from audio coding and speech coding into a unified system. The present publication outlines all aspects of this standardization effort, starting with the history and motivation of the MPEG work item, describing all technical features of the final system, and further discussing listening test results and performance numbers which show the advantages of the new system over current state-of-the-art codecs.