You *cannot* break Information Theory and with
a given bandwidth and Signal/Noise ratio you can only get a certain bit rate (and it gets more difficult to get there the closer you get to that point).
This is just plain marketing hype...
The only promising technique discovered so far is to use multiple antennas at the transmitter & receiver and its still far from a working _product_.
Yes, you are correct. The encoding algorithm is patented. So now we have an encoder which is copyright-free (well, at least the copyright holder is not charging anyone) but the algorithm itself is still patented. For a patent-free audio compression algorithm check our Ogg Vorbis at http://xiph.org/
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You *cannot* break Information Theory and with a given bandwidth and Signal/Noise ratio you can only get a certain bit rate (and it gets more difficult to get there the closer you get to that point). This is just plain marketing hype... The only promising technique discovered so far is to use multiple antennas at the transmitter & receiver and its still far from a working _product_.
Yes, you are correct. The encoding algorithm is patented. So now we have an encoder which is copyright-free (well, at least the copyright holder is not charging anyone) but the algorithm itself is still patented. For a patent-free audio compression algorithm check our Ogg Vorbis at http://xiph.org/