Patent · US Expired

Continuous frequency dynamic range audio compressor

US6097824A · kind A · utility

37Cited by
10References
20Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateJun 6, 1997
Grant dateAug 1, 2000
Priority date
Expiry dateJun 6, 2017

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC H)Electricity
  • CPC primaryH04R2430/03
  • WIPO fieldAudio-visual technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

An improved multiband audio compressor is well behaved for both wide band and narrow band signals, and shows no undesirable artifacts at filter crossover frequencies. The compressor includes a heavily overlapped filter bank, which is the heart of the present invention. The filter bank filters the input signal into a number of heavily overlapping frequency bands. Sufficient overlapping of the frequency bands reduces the ripple in the frequency response, given a slowly swept sine wave input signal, to below about 2 dB, 1 dB, or even 0.5 dB or less with increasing amount of overlap in the bands. Each band is fed into a power estimator, which integrates the power of the band and generates a power signal. Each power signal is passed to a dynamic range compression gain calculation block, which calculates a gain based upon the power signal. Each band is multiplied by its respective gain in order to generate scaled bands. The scaled bands are then summed to generate an output signal.

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.