Performance Evaluation of Multichannel Audio Compression

Abstract

In recent years, multichannel audio systems are widely used in modern sound devices as it can provide more realistic and engaging experience to the listener. This paper focuses on the performance evaluation of three lossy, i.e. AAC, Ogg Vorbis, and Opus, and three lossless compression, i.e. FLAC, TrueAudio, and WavPack, for multichannel audio signals, including stereo, 5.1 and 7.1 channels. Experiments were conducted on the same three audio files but with different channel configurations. The performance of each encoder was evaluated based on its encoding time (averaged over 100 times), data reduction, and audio quality. Usually, there is always a trade-off between the three metrics. To simplify the evaluation, a new integrated performance metric was proposed that combines all the three performance metrics. Using the new measure, FLAC was found to be the best lossless compression, while Ogg Vorbis and Opus were found to be the best for lossy compression depends on the channel configuration. This result could be used in determining the proper audio format for multichannel audio systems.