Talking about MPEG audio coding, I heard a lot about “Layer 1, 2 and 3”. What does it mean, exactly?
MPEG-1, IS 11172-3, describes the compression of audio signals using high performance perceptual coding schemes. It specifies a family of three audio coding schemes, simply called Layer-1,-2,-3, with increasing encoder complexity and performance (sound quality per bitrate). The three codecs are compatible in a hierarchical way, i.e.
