The Communications Research Centre (CRC) has struck a collaborative R&D deal to improve the possible future standard in audio coding technology. The agreement with Royal Philips Electronics will see the CRC work to improve the firm’s Parametric Audio Coding scheme. The technology achieves a compression ratio of 60:1 and is set to become an ISO/IEC standard called MPEG-4 Extension 2. The technology is expected to have application in network transmission capacity, radio frequency usage and storage media....