Reading the paper, it's a reimplementation of Soundstream with a tweaked loss and layer norm added, and adds a 2-layer lstm to the encoder. These changes give a

Reading the paper, it's a reimplementation of Soundstream with a tweaked loss and layer norm added, and adds a 2-layer lstm to the encoder. These changes give a real quality boost over the quality of lyra v2 (which is also Soundstream, but lighter weight). Note that encodec is also using much more compute compared to Lyra v2. Additionally, LayerNorm is adding a lot of latency, which is why they advertise it as file compression instead of as a streaming codec. The entropy coding seems like a lightweight version of AudioLM.