Inter BEE 2010: The Fraunhofer Society of Germany (FhG/IIS) exhibited an ultra-low delay AAC-ELD.

The Integrated Circuits Division of Fraunhofer Society in Germany (FhG/IIS, 7402) exhibited the AAC-ELD, a high-quality, low-latency audio CODEC system designed for relay-broadcast use. The institute, which is recognized as the developer of MP3, is also known as one of the developers of AAC systems used for DVDs (Europe) and terrestrial digital broadcasting (EU and Japan). Using these AAC systems as core technologies, the company has continued to research and develop a variety of derivative methods such as HE-AAC and AAC-LD.

The AAC-ELD system exhibited at this year's InterBEE was a further evolved AAC-LD version that was originally developed by the institute. A number of efficient CODECs has lowered the limit in delay time, which is the foreseeable theoretical limit that results when there is a rise in computing speed such as while storing information in a buffer. The minimum delay for an AAC-LD is 20msec but this has been reduced to 15msec with the AAC-ELD (64kbps rate).

Incorporating AAC, the sound quality of the AAC-ELD is excellent and it can also be easily applied at a 64kbps rate. This level of sound quality is superior to that of MP3 at the same rate and during the demonstration at the venue, the AAC-ELD at 96kbps displayed similar performance when compared to MPEG Layer II at 128kbps and APT-X at 196kbps.

In addition to voice transmission during relays, it is also anticipated that AAC-ELD will be used for applications such as videoconferencing.


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The ultra-low latency CODEC AAC-ELD developed by the Fraunhofer Society's Integrated Circuits Division is expected to be applied for IP phones, videoconferencing and voice relay.