What is coding gain?

Question

What does coding gain mean and what are its implications in terma of data rate and transmission bandwidth?

Answer 1

One reference provided the following definition:

Coding gain:
The increase in efficiency that a coded signal provides over an uncoded signal. Expressed in decibels, the coding gain indicates a level of power reduction that can be achieved.

Another reference talked about coding gain like this:

Parametric Audio Coding contains a highly efficient tool to code the stereo image enabling Parametric Stereo AAC to be combined in a backwards compatible fashion with High Efficiency AAC for usage in the low bit-rate range. This can offer an increase of up to 33% in coding gain over HE-AAC permitting very high quality audio compression at the lowest bit rates.


So coding gain is a term having to do with data compression and / or error correction which allows more data to be sent over the same channel or use less power.

A