MP3 Decoding in Harman Kardon Products
Harman Kardon has long been a technological leader in the
audio industry, with a long list of “firsts” that includes the
first stereo receiver, the first use of Dolby* Type B noise reduction
in a cassette player and, more recently, the world’s first receiver
to feature HDCD
®
, Logic 7
®
and VMAx
®
digital audio processing.
Continuing this tradition of innovation, Harman Kardon was
the first brand to fully embrace MP3 technology by offering
MP3 playback in both a five-disc DVD changer and a CD-R/RW
recorder. Harman Kardon’s audio/video receivers are the first
to integrate MP3 with built-in decoding and both coaxial
and optical front-panel digital inputs. Now, enjoying the
wide variety of MP3 audio content is as simple as playing
an MP3-encoded CD in a DVD 50 or CDR 30, or connecting
the output of a compatible computer sound card to the digital
input of an AVR 110, AVR 210, AVR 310 or AVR 510.
The Basics of MP3 Audio
From a technical definition standpoint, what is popularly referred to as “MP3” is more
precisely the “Level 3” format for recording audio in the MPEG-1 video compression standard.
In simple terms, this means that an MP3 file is a digitally compressed version of an audio track.
The original audio may be a file initially created for distribution in the MP3 form, or it may be
created from an existing source, such as a CD. The difference between standard digital audio
files and an MP3 file is that the average 3-minute song takes up about 32 megabytes of space,
but the MP3 takes up considerably less memory, enabling more songs to be placed on a single
disc or memory card, with little compromise in sound quality. The compression process relies
on oddities of human perceptions of sound. For example, louder sounds mask softer sounds
so that we don’t hear them, and sometimes the same material is repeated in both channels
of a stereo recording.
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