"CD quality" is 44.1khz over 16bit.
> We achieve an approximate 10x compression rate compared with MP3 at 64 kbps, without a loss of quality.
but then later:
> The key to lossy compression is to identify changes that will not be perceivable by humans
On your second point: they probably meant that there is no loss in perceived quality, of course it's a lossy algorithm.
6kbps sound demo is really impressive! Initially I was turned off by aliasing artifacts (hiss) but to be fair 6kbps is a really really low bitrate.
Between this effort and the recently announced Google-led multi-channel/immersive audio codec initiative, I am pretty excited about the future of audio streaming and distribution.
... but only if you are a bat.
Link?
The flute in particular suffers quite a lot and the triangle disappears completely!
Most research in that field operates at 16kHz. Enough for most speech applications, not enough for CD quality. In general, CD quality in this field means a high enough sample rate that you can play all audible frequencies.
I understand all of this reads like pointless pedantry, but a) it feels good indulging in it b) certain word combinations (such as "CD quality") have meanings backed by broad consensus, please use them responsibly so readers do not have to overexert their loose interpretation muscle.
If they mean wide band, say wide band, noone will bat an eye.
Reading this extremely charitably, I think the contrast is supposed to be to speech which is normally uses much smaller sample rates. E.g. AMR-WB samples at 16 kHz. Speex, back in the day, supported up to 32 kHz.
Full quality digitally distributed audio is often sampled at 48 kHz (e.g. Opus - the default audio codec on YouTube and many other sources), so I think "CD quality" is just supposed to emphasize that it's full-band rather than wide band or narrow band.