TABLE OF CONTENTS Within the audio field the Audio Engineering Society (AES) has been a lead body in determining digital interconnect standards. Although the AES is a professional society, and not a standards body as such, its recommendations first published in the AES3-1985 document1 have formed the basis for many international standards documents concerning a two-channel digital audio interface. The Society has been instrumental in coordinating professional equipment manufacturers' views on interface standards although it has tended to ignore consumer applications to some extent, preferring to leave those to the IEC (see below). A consumer interface was initially developed by Sony and Philips, subsequently to be standardized by the IEC and EIAJ, and as a result there are many things in common between the professional and consumer implementations. Before setting out to describe the international standard two-channel interface it is important to give a summary of the history of the standard, since it will then be realized how difficult it is to call this interface by one definitive title.
Other organizations that based standards on AES3 recommendations were the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the International Radio Consultative Committee (CCIR) (now the ITU-R), the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the Electronic Industries Association of Japan (EIAJ) and the British Standards Institute (BSI). Each of these organizations formulated a document describing a standard for a two-channel digital audio interface, and although these documents were all very similar there were often also either subtle or...
