A Performance Assessment of Real-time Multichannel Audio Codec

In this paper, we describe a real-time implementation of a multi-channel auido codec system that is based on the MPEG-1 audio algorithm. The major feature of this system is that it has a flexible multi-DSP system that can be adapted for various applications with using up to four TMS320C40 DSPs. The purpose of this paper is to present the problems of the system and is to describe the optimized methods to solve the problems in the view of hardware and software. Our audio codec is composed of an encoder an a decoder system and the bit rate of bitstream is up to 384 kbps. Fast input/output interfaces, DSP overloads, and inter-DSP communications methods with high speed are considered in multi-DSP H/W. Also, to run real-time in S/W, optimizing methods of algorithm are considered. After implementation of system, the subjective assessment method, and 'triple stimulus/hidden reference/double blind' that recommended by ITU-R TG10/3 is adopted for the quality of our system. All test items except one are awarded difference grades(diffgrade) better than 1-. Form the results, multi-channel audio system can be used for HDTV service.