This post is an answer to the comment by Alex Converse on my previous post:
It’s interesting how quickly you dismiss SLS for being a hybrid coder with AAC. From a pure lossless standpoint that is a weakness but from a broader perspective it allows for a lossy layer that is widely compatible with existing hardware.
Let’s see why scalable coding is a weakness from lossless coding standpoint.
There are few hybrid lossy+lossless codecs out there which use lossy part in lossless reconstruction, e.g. MPEG-4 SLS, DTS-HD MA and WavPack. First two use two different coding techniques – MDCT or QMF for core coding and usual lossless coding for difference. In WavPack both parts are coded in the same way and correction data is stored in different block. For DCT-based codecs there are many ways of performing DCT (from trivial matrix multiplication to FFT-based implementation to decomposing DCT into smaller size DCTs) which may lead to slightly different output depending on method chosen. Thus, you should have a reference way (i.e. not the fastest one) of doing lossy stuff or you can’t guarantee truly lossless reconstruction. Also residue (the difference between original and lossy coded signal) tends to be more chaotic in this case and thus less compressible.
Another issue is what to do with correction data. If you put it into a separate file, you will have more troubles since you have to manage two files; if you put it all into single file, its size will be bigger than pure lossless coded file (unless you have very stupid method of lossless coding).
And now comes an argument that I really hate: “but it allows legacy players handle those files”. That, in my opinion, is this post title. Making it backward compatible just cripples it. In that case you need to implement new (and sometimes completely different features) in old limits and relying to new technology. So in some case it just degrades quality and/or forces you to encode something twice — for old feature set and its replacement. Another reason is that it just delays that codec adoption: old player can play it so why should I bother about this new codec support? I suspect this was a reason why we have MLP but no DTS-HD support.
The worst offender here is MP3. This codec sucks by design. It uses 36-point (or three 12-point) MDCTs which are not trivial to speed-up unlike power-of-two transforms and the output of MDCTs is used as input to QMF used in MPEG Audio layers I&II, as it claimed “to be compatible with them”. As claimed here, MP3 would perform better and since it comes from one of the leading LAME developers, I believe it. And of course MP3Pro. Most players in existence just ignore extension part and play crippled version of sound. Someone may argue that’s because it’s proprietary. Okay, look at HE-AAC where SBR is documented at least, it may still cause some confusion since it may be detected only when decoding audio frame.
In my opinion both implementing new codec support and special codec extension in general case is just single-time action with comparable effort (hacking existing code for new extension support and detection may be not that easy). And thus, adding a new codec should be preferred. MPEG-2 introduced both AAC (please look how it was called back then) and multichannel extensions to layers I-III. Guess which one works better?