On the use of explicit redundancy for delayless soft-decision audio decoding

Wireless transmission systems for high-quality digital audio signals require a low end-to-end delay and strong robustness against channel distortions. In this work we investigate a Bayesian approach to delayless soft-decision decoding of high-quality audio signals jointly exploiting both implicit redundancy within the audio signal and explicit sample-wise redundancy appended by a channel (block) encoder. Because our approach introduces no algorithmic delay, it can be employed in audio transmission systems that are extremely sensitive to latency like, e. g., wireless digital microphones. Experiments carried out with representative audio signals transmitted over AWGN channels show a significant increase in signal quality.