English

MBCodec:Thorough disentangle for high-fidelity audio compression

Sound 2025-09-23 v1 Audio and Speech Processing

Abstract

High-fidelity neural audio codecs in Text-to-speech (TTS) aim to compress speech signals into discrete representations for faithful reconstruction. However, prior approaches faced challenges in effectively disentangling acoustic and semantic information within tokens, leading to a lack of fine-grained details in synthesized speech. In this study, we propose MBCodec, a novel multi-codebook audio codec based on Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ) that learns a hierarchically structured representation. MBCodec leverages self-supervised semantic tokenization and audio subband features from the raw signals to construct a functionally-disentangled latent space. In order to encourage comprehensive learning across various layers of the codec embedding space, we introduce adaptive dropout depths to differentially train codebooks across layers, and employ a multi-channel pseudo-quadrature mirror filter (PQMF) during training. By thoroughly decoupling semantic and acoustic features, our method not only achieves near-lossless speech reconstruction but also enables a remarkable 170x compression of 24 kHz audio, resulting in a low bit rate of just 2.2 kbps. Experimental evaluations confirm its consistent and substantial outperformance of baselines across all evaluations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.17006,
  title  = {MBCodec:Thorough disentangle for high-fidelity audio compression},
  author = {Ruonan Zhang and Xiaoyang Hao and Yichen Han and Junjie Cao and Yue Liu and Kai Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.17006},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

5 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:48:09.101Z