Introduction to AVS Audio

This paper describes a general audio coding algorithm which has been recently standardized by AVS, China. The algorithm is based on a perceptual coding technique. The codec delivers near CD-quality audio at 128kb/s. This paper describes the coder structure in detail and discusses the reasons for specific design methods. A summary of the subjective test results are presented for the prototype codec. Comparison Mean Opinion Score (CMOS) test indicates that the quality of the AVS audio coder is comparable with MPEG Layer-3 audio coder. A real-time decoder was used for the characterization test, which is based on a 16-bit fixed-point DSP. The performance of the DSP solution was demonstrated, including computational complexity and storage characteristics.