Dolby Digital Plus

Dolby Digital Plus, also known as Enhanced AC-3 (and commonly abbreviated as DD+ or E-AC-3, or EC-3) is a digital audio compression scheme developed by Dolby Labs for transport and storage of multi-channel digital audio. It is a successor to Dolby Digital (AC-3), also developed by Dolby, and has a number of improvements including support for a wider range of data rates (32kbit/s to 6144kbit/s), increased channel count and multi-program support (via substreams), and additional tools (algorithms) for representing compressed data and counteracting artifacts. While Dolby Digital (AC-3) supports up to 5 full-bandwidth audio channels at a maximum bitrate of 640kbit/s, E-AC-3 supports up to 15 full-bandwidth audio channels at a maximum bitrate of 6.144 Mbit/s.