Digital Radio Advances Digital Audio Broadcast System

Lucent Digital Radio, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lucent Technologies, has announced a technical advance in its in-band on-channel (IBOC) digital audio broadcast (DAB) system.

The new innovation, called multi-streaming, will allow new IBOC receivers to transparently reconstruct a digital signal in order to deliver quality sound at a geographic location of the receiver. Until now, digital broadcast systems could only be received in a portion of an analog service area. Through Lucent's new mutli-streaming technology, digital signals can be received throughout the analog service area.

The multi-streaming solution works in both AM and FM IBOC systems and is integrated with Lucent's Perceptual audio coder (PAC). Employed in the IBOC DAB system, the PAC encoder converts analog audio signal into a digital signal, then compresses the data by at least a 15:1 ratio. As a result, this encoder lets radio systems offer new capabilities, such as CD-like audio quality, at bit rates lower than 96 kb/s.