<FONT face=Arial size=2><A href="http://www.audioholics.com/news/pressreleases/MP3surroundThomson.php"><IMG style="WIDTH: 125px; HEIGHT: 60px" alt=[mp3surround] hspace=10 src="http://www.audioholics.com/news/thumbs/mp3surround_th.jpg" align=left border=0></A>MP3 - depending upon your viewpoint it's either the holy grail of music convenience or the biggest step backwards since VHS beat out Betamax. Thomson today announced that mp3, the world's most popular audio compression format, <STRONG>
is finally going multi-channel</STRONG>. Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, inventors of mp3; together with Thomson, co-inventors of mp3; and Agere Systems, have joined to launch mp3 SURROUND into the consumer and commercial markets. This technology will enable 5.1 channels surround-quality sound for a broad spectrum of applications including web-based music distribution, broadcasting systems, PC-related audiovisual or gaming applications, consumer electronics and automotive systems. </FONT>
<P><FONT face=Arial size=2>Hmmm.. Welcome to the future? The applications are endless: games, online movie services... mp3 SURROUND supports high-quality multi-channel sound at bit rates comparable to those currently used to encode stereo mp3 material, resulting in files half the size of common compressed surround formats. At the same time, the new format offers complete backward compatibility to any existing mp3 software and hardware devices. There are
free demo players and encoders online so check it out for yourself.</FONT></P>
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