Standards-setting activity for US digital radio system IBOC has been temporarily suspended by the steering committee of the National Radio Systems Committee’s DAB subgroup.

Ibiquity must now choose to continue to tweak its transmission encoding or chose another audio coding algorithm such as AAC or MPEG.

Growing concerns about the performance of Ibiquity’s PAC codec on AM at low bit rates has led the steering committee to make this decision.

Ibiquity issued a statement about the criticism saying: “At this time, we concur with their decision to temporarily delay these efforts until the issue is resolved … we have an on-going improvement plan and anticipate resolution of the AM audio quality issue as soon as possible.”