Signal compressing apparatus

1. A signal reproducing method comprising the steps of:

reproducing an encoding-resultant signal of a predetermined recording-medium format from a digital disc including a DVD, the encoding-resultant signal containing audio information resulting from quantization of an audio signal including a multi-channel audio signal at a quantization degree higher than a degree of quantization for a CD and at a quantization sampling frequency higher than that for a CD, the quantization sampling frequency including 48 kHz;

using a first decoder and thereby decoding the reproduced encoding-resultant signal into a formatting-resultant signal corresponding to a predetermined format for a digital disc including a DVD, the formatting-resultant signal including segments corresponding to user data areas prescribed in the predetermined format, a compression-resultant signal being placed in the segments of the formatting-resultant signal;

deformatting the formatting-resultant signal into the compression-resultant signal;

using a second decoder and thereby expanding the compression-resultant signal into a quantization-resultant signal through a Huffman decoding process; and

converting the quantization-resultant signal into the audio signal including the multi-channel audio signal.

2. A signal reproducing method comprising the steps of:

reproducing an encoding-resultant signal of a predetermined recording-medium format from a digital disc including a DVD, the encoding-resultant signal containing audio information resulting from quantization of an audio signal including a multi-channel audio signal at a quantization degree higher than a degree of quantization for a CD and at a quantization sampling frequency higher than that for a CD, the quantization sampling frequency including 48 kHz;

using a first decoder and thereby decoding the reproduced encoding-resultant signal into a formatting-resultant signal corresponding to a predetermined format for a digital disc including a DVD, the formatting-resultant signal including segments corresponding to user data areas prescribed in the predetermined format, a compression-resultant signal being placed in the segments of the formatting-resultant signal;

deformatting the formatting-resultant signal into the compression-resultant signal;

using a second decoder and thereby expanding the compression-resultant signal into a quantization-resultant signal through one of an orthogonal decoding process and a Huffman decoding process; and

converting the quantization-resultant signal into the audio signal including the multi-channel audio signal.

3. A signal recording method comprising the steps of:

quantizing an input audio signal including a multi-channel audio signal into a quantization-resultant signal at a quantization degree higher than a degree of quantization for a CD and at a quantization sampling frequency higher than that for a CD, the quantization sampling frequency including 96 kHz;

using a first encoder and thereby compressing the quantization-resultant signal into a compression-resultant signal through a Huffman encoding process;

formatting the compression-resultant signal into a formatting-resultant signal corresponding to a predetermined format for a digital disc including a DVD, the formatting-resultant signal including segments corresponding to user data areas prescribed in the predetermined format, the compression-resultant signal being placed in the segments of the formatting-resultant signal;

using a second encoder and thereby encoding the formatting-resultant signal into an encoding-resultant signal of a predetermined recording-medium format; and

recording the encoding-resultant signal on a digital disc including a DVD.