Welcome to the April 1996 issue of DSP: A Review Journal; for this issue we again achieve our goal of publishing DSP-related papers of the highest quality across a suite of disciplines. In this way we hope to juxtapose, in a concise volume, applications of DSP to a variety of technical disciplines.
From General Electrical Research and Development Center and Amati Communications Corporation, authored by Naofal Al-Dhahir and John Cioffi, respectively, we present ''Symbol Rate Optimization for the MMSE-DFE on Bandlimited Dispersive Channels.'' As always, ''bandwidth equals money''; here the authors consider symbol rate optimization over bandlimited channels typical of digital subscriber loops. Numerous data compression techniques applied to telephone channel bandwidth voice have been studied during the past several decades. The future we know portends electronic delivery of audio signals possessing much greater bandwidth than voice. Using CD quality as a baseline, in the paper ''Compression of High-Quality Audio Signals, Including Recent Methods Using Wavelet Packets,'' Mike Sablatash and Todor Cooklev review compression of wideband audio signals using wavelet packets. High-resolution spectral estimation is a timeless research topic. In ''Comparison between the Matrix Pencil Method and the Fourier Transform for High-Resolution Spectral Estimation,'' Jose Β΄Enrique Ferna Β΄ndez del RΔ± Β΄o and Tapan K. Sarkar make use of extensive simulation models and theoretical analysis to develop performance metrics for the two methods in terms of estimator bias and estimator variance.
In addition to the technical papers highlighted in the preceding paragraph we have several announcements to make. May is a nice time to visit Atlanta; this May in a short space of time four conferences of interest to our DSP readership will take place. First is VTC'96, April 28 -May 1, a leading mobile radio conference; contact Professor Gordon L.