Patent attributes
Embodiments of the present invention are directed to a binaural cue coding (BCC) scheme in which an externally provided audio signal (e.g., a studio engineering audio signal) is transmitted, along with derived cue codes, to a receiver instead of an automatically downmixed audio signal. The cue codes are (adaptively) synchronized with the externally provided audio signal to compensate for time lags (and changes in those time lags) between the externally downmixed audio signal and the multi-channel signal used to generate the cue codes. If the receiver is a legacy receiver, then the studio engineered audio signal will typically provide a higher-quality playback than would be provided by the automatically downmixed audio signal. If the receiver is a BCC-capable receiver, then the synchronization of the cue codes with the externally provided audio signal will typically improve the quality of the synthesized playback.