Walt Disney, George Lucas, Samuel L. Warner – and Karlheinz Brandenburg. On October 19, 2023, the mp3 co-inventor joined the ranks of renowned award winners honored by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). He received the Digital Signal Processing Medal for his contributions to the development of the MPEG standards for digital audio compression. The 2023 recipients were announced at the annual SMPTE Media Technology Summit Awards Gala at Ovation Hollywood, California, USA.  

Karlheinz Brandenburg is a renowned scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur. His visionary work has decisively shaped today’s landscape of digital audio technology. He is known worldwide as the co-inventor of mp3 and the MPEG audio standards. In 1989, Brandenburg received his doctorate from the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in the Department of Electrical Engineering with a thesis on digital audio coding and perception-oriented measurement methods.

The research results of his dissertation are the basis of MPEG-1 Layer 3 (mp3), MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), and most other modern audio compression methods. Together with his colleagues at Fraunhofer IIS and the MPEG Audio Standardization Group, he pioneered the development and establishment of this revolutionary invention in the 1990s. The technology was standardized as ISO/IEC MPEG Audio Layer 3. For these achievements, he is now being honored by the SMTPE with the Digital Processing Medal. 

Prof. Brandenburg is pleased that his work is also being honored by the film and video industry: “The recognition of the early work by the SMPTE shows that mp3 and AAC have an importance far beyond the field of audio signal processing technologies. This is a great honor. As always, I’d like to thank everyone else here who has contributed to this development.” Before his current position as CEO of Brandenburg Labs GmbH and as a senior professor at the Ilmenau University of Technology, he was institute director at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT and headed the Department of Electronic Media Technology at the Ilmenau University of Technology.         

About Brandenburg Labs

Brandenburg Labs GmbH creates intuitive and realistic listening experiences with immersive audio for headphones, allowing users to dive deep into any soundscape. Brandenburg Labs was founded in 2019 by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Karlheinz Brandenburg. He is known as the co-inventor of the mp3 format. Meanwhile, the interdisciplinary team in Ilmenau, Thuringia, comprises 16 employees. The creation of an immersive audio experience with headphones has presented science and industry with enormous challenges for decades. Brandenburg Labs is meeting these challenges and has set itself the goal of placing solutions and products on the market that enrich digital life using immersive audio. As a spin-off of the Ilmenau University of Technology and the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT, Brandenburg Labs can draw on many years of research in the field of audio at these institutions. The technology makes it possible to recreate real acoustic environments via headphones or to create new, realistic listening environments. In this way, virtual sounds are seamlessly integrated into the lives of users, bridging the gap between the real and digital worlds. In the near future, Brandenburg Labs will market Augmented Auditory Reality (AAR) systems and intelligent headphones (PARty).

Franciska Wollwert
Chief Communication Officer