Patent ID: 8019205

Claim:
A signal expanding method comprising the steps of: receiving 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 at least one of a 2-channel audio signal and 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 96 kHz; using a first decoder and thereby decoding the received 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; and 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 by a Huffman decoding process.