In 2001 Thomson multimedia announced the arrival of mp3PRO, the next generation of mp3. mp3PRO offers two key advantages: enhanced sound quality and improved compression. It provides 128kbs performance at a 64kbs encoding rate, thereby bringing genuine CD quality and enabling Internet broadcasters to lower their bandwidth costs.
The new technology has been brought in by Swedish partner Coding Technologies, who initially developed it when researching a hearing device for the deaf. It involves taking the high-quality parts from the lower frequency range of a music file and replicating them up to a higher frequency. Coding Technologies have combined their work with Thomson and Fraunhofer's pioneering work in audio coding, and the result is mp3PRO, which makes it possible to download and store 24 albums on a single CD-R.
