Sony Corporation

Benjamin Frederic Nettre

Shiro Suzuki

Keisuke Toyama

Any disagreement of the power level before encoding an audio signal and the power level after encoding the audio signal is adjusted to improve the sound quality to the auditory sense. The present invention provides an audio signal encoding apparatus comprising, a band dividing section that divides an input audio signal by a plurality frequency sub-bands, a spectral transform section that transforms the audio signal of each frequency sub-band into a spectral signal, a normalizing section that normalizes each spectral signal by means of a scale factor and generates a normalized spectral signal, a quantizing section that quantizes each normalized spectral signal and generates a quantized spectral signal, a scale factor adjusting section that adjusts the value of the scale factor used by the normalizing section according to the normalized spectral signal and the quantized spectral signal, and an encoding section that encodes at least each quantized spectral signal and the scale factor used by the normalizing section or the scale factor adjusted by the scale factor adjusting section. The scale factor adjusting section is adapted to compare the absolute value of the difference of the energy of the normalized spectral signal and the energy of the quantized spectral signal with a first threshold value for each frequency sub-band and, if the absolute value of the difference is greater than the first threshold value, adjust the value of the scale factor used by the normalizing section so as to make the absolute value of the difference of the energies not greater than a second threshold value.

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Tokyo, Japan

Benjamin Frederic Nettre