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This article is from the MPEG FAQ, by Frank Gadegast phade@cs.tu-berlin.de with numerous contributions by others.

32 Talking about MPEG audio coding, I heard a lot about "Layer 1, 2 and 3". What does it mean, exactly? (MPEG Audio Codec Family ("Layer 1, 2, 3"))

MPEG describes the compression of audio signals using high performance
perceptual coding schemes. It specifies a family of three audio coding
schemes, simply called Layer-1,-2,-3, with increasing encoder complexity
and performance (sound quality per bitrate) from 1 to 3.
The three codecs are compatible in a hierarchical way, i.e. a Layer-N
decoder is able to decode bitstream data encoded in Layer-N and all Layers
below N (e.g., a Layer-3 decoder may accept Layer-1,-2 and -3, whereas a
Layer-2 decoder may accept only Layer-1 and -2.)

 

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• prev: 31 MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 are ready-for-use. How do the standards look like? (ISO-MPEG Standard - MPEG Audio Layer-3)
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• next: 33 So we have a family of three audio coding schemes. What does the MPEG standard define, exactly? (MPEG Audio Codec Family ("Layer 1, 2, 3"))

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