BSCodec: A Band-Split Neural Codec for High-Quality Universal Audio Reconstruction

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wang, Haoran, Shi, Jiatong, Tian, Jinchuan, Li, Bohan, Yu, Kai, Watanabe, Shinji
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Wang, Haoran
Shi, Jiatong
Tian, Jinchuan
Li, Bohan
Yu, Kai
Watanabe, Shinji
author_facet Wang, Haoran
Shi, Jiatong
Tian, Jinchuan
Li, Bohan
Yu, Kai
Watanabe, Shinji
contents Neural audio codecs have recently enabled high-fidelity reconstruction at high compression rates, especially for speech. However, speech and non-speech audio exhibit fundamentally different spectral characteristics: speech energy concentrates in narrow bands around pitch harmonics (80-400 Hz), while non-speech audio requires faithful reproduction across the full spectrum, particularly preserving higher frequencies that define timbre and texture. This poses a challenge: speech-optimized neural codecs suffer degradation on music or sound. Treating the full spectrum holistically is suboptimal: frequency bands have vastly different information density and perceptual importance by content type, yet full-band approaches apply uniform capacity across frequencies without accounting for these acoustic structures. To address this gap, we propose BSCodec (Band-Split Codec), a novel neural audio codec architecture that splits the spectral dimension into separate bands and compresses each band independently. Experimental results demonstrate that BSCodec achieves superior reconstruction over baselines across sound and music, while maintaining competitive quality in the speech domain, when trained on the same combined dataset of speech, music and sound. Downstream benchmark tasks further confirm that BSCodec shows strong potential for use in downstream applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_06150
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BSCodec: A Band-Split Neural Codec for High-Quality Universal Audio Reconstruction
Wang, Haoran
Shi, Jiatong
Tian, Jinchuan
Li, Bohan
Yu, Kai
Watanabe, Shinji
Audio and Speech Processing
Neural audio codecs have recently enabled high-fidelity reconstruction at high compression rates, especially for speech. However, speech and non-speech audio exhibit fundamentally different spectral characteristics: speech energy concentrates in narrow bands around pitch harmonics (80-400 Hz), while non-speech audio requires faithful reproduction across the full spectrum, particularly preserving higher frequencies that define timbre and texture. This poses a challenge: speech-optimized neural codecs suffer degradation on music or sound. Treating the full spectrum holistically is suboptimal: frequency bands have vastly different information density and perceptual importance by content type, yet full-band approaches apply uniform capacity across frequencies without accounting for these acoustic structures. To address this gap, we propose BSCodec (Band-Split Codec), a novel neural audio codec architecture that splits the spectral dimension into separate bands and compresses each band independently. Experimental results demonstrate that BSCodec achieves superior reconstruction over baselines across sound and music, while maintaining competitive quality in the speech domain, when trained on the same combined dataset of speech, music and sound. Downstream benchmark tasks further confirm that BSCodec shows strong potential for use in downstream applications.
title BSCodec: A Band-Split Neural Codec for High-Quality Universal Audio Reconstruction
topic Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06150