<p>A hybrid sinusoidal/pulse excitation encoder has been recently proposed for constructing a scalable audio encoder. The base layer consisting of data supplied by the sinusoidal encoder retains the main features of the input signal achieving medium to high quality audio at a very low bit rate. Quality can be further enhanced by adding excitation signal layers associated with a decreasing decimation that increasingly model more subtle aspects of the original signal. The invention provides a method of mixing the different excitation signal layers so that the full concept of scalability is realised without compromising the quality of the encoded signals. The mixing is controlled via a quality parameter that weights the significance of previous layers when constructing a new higher layer.</p>
