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Higher quality sound over the web or your mobile phone

17/09/2003

"NESTA wants to encourage the home-grown creative talent and develop ideas like Chris' that could generate the UK's economic wealth of the future."

Scala Technology Ltd is owned and run by Dr Chris Dunn from North London. Chris has fifteen years experience developing audio signal processing technologies, and has previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at King's College London, and as a design engineer at Dolby Labs in San Francisco. He has been developing Scala's coding technology for three years.

At present the most established methods of audio coding are based on fixed bit-rate techniques, where a predetermined number of information bits are transmitted each second. This approach can be satisfactory where the quality of the communication network is guaranteed, for example when used to store audio files on PCs. However, on networks with variable quality like the congested Internet there is no certainty that the minimum necessary data rate can be maintained, leading to signal dropouts and pauses in transmission.

Scala has developed scalable bit-rate coding technology that addresses these problems by encoding audio signals in a way that ensures continuous transmission regardless of the instantaneous network bandwidth. When the network bandwidth is high a good quality signal can be received and decoded, while to compensate for any reduction in bandwidth the receiver simply decodes a lower quality version of the signal. As well as internet audio streaming applications, this technology could also be beneficial in streaming across third generation mobile phone networks, where moving between cells or a variable number of active users changes the bandwidth available to each individual user from instant to instant.

NESTA support, over 12 months, will help Scala to develop coding algorithms to a stage where the technology can be commercially exploited. It is planned to extend coding to accommodate stereo audio signals, and develop a Java codec that allows simple streaming to Java-enabled devices.

NESTA Chief Executive Jeremy Newton said:

"NESTA wants to encourage the home-grown creative talent and develop ideas like Chris' that could generate the UK's economic wealth of the future."

Chris Dunn studied Electrical and Information Sciences at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and went on to gain a PHD in Electronic System Engineering at the University of Essex. Chris has worked as a lecturer and research associate at the University of Essex and King's College London.