Patent ID: 7698006

Claim:
An apparatus for adapting an audio signal, comprising: an audio usage environment information management means for collecting, describing and managing audio usage environment information related to consuming the audio signal; and an audio adaptation means for adapting the audio signal to the audio usage environment information, wherein the audio adaptation means adapts the audio signal by changing sound field characteristics of the audio signal based on impulse response preference information of the user, wherein the audio usage environment information includes user characteristics information, the user characteristics information includes the impulse response preference information that uses an impulse response to describe a sound field preference of the user for the audio signal, the user characteristics information further includes sampling frequency preference information, bits per sample preference information, and number of channels preference information of the impulse response, and wherein the impulse response preference information is provided by an element of an extensible Markup Language (XML) schema, the element including a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) address from which data of the impulse response is obtained.