high efficiency AAC (audio codec) (HE-AAC)

High Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding(HE-AAC) is an audio compression developed by Coding Technologies GmbH and marketed under the name aacPlus.

HE-AAC or aacPlus uses the SBR (Spectral Band Replication) method and parametric methods and supplements the AAC files with information from which the decoder can reconstruct the high frequencies during playback.

HE-AAC is characterized by a low bit rate, it has about 40% higher efficiency compared to MPEG-4 AAC. Thus, surround sound is reproduced in good quality with a bit rate of only 128 kbit/s and stereo sound with only 32 kbit/s. The method is of particular interest for streaming media such as broadcasting, mobile multimedia and Internet radio.