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WideCodec matches NVIDIA NeMo-44k on naturalness at a tenth of the bitrate

A single codebook at 50 tokens per second, scored against four other 44 kHz-class codecs on a 9,291-clip multilingual wideband set.

Research from Scicom AI Enterprise Solutions has improved WideCodec over our 2026-07-21 release, UTMOSv2 from 2.788 to 2.919 on a multilingual wideband benchmark matching NVIDIA NeMo-44k (2.903) at roughly 1/10 of its bitrate (0.8 kbps vs 8 kbps, single codebook, 50 tokens/s).

Scatter chart of UTMOSv2 naturalness against bitrate on a log scale, over a 9,291-clip wideband set. WideCodec 2026-08-16 scores 2.919 at 0.8 kbps, up from 2.788 for the 2026-07-21 release at the same bitrate. nvidia nemo44k scores 2.903 at 8 kbps, dac 2.672 at 8 kbps, snac44k 2.340 at 2.6 kbps and encodec48k 2.042 at 24 kbps. A dashed line marks ground truth at 2.822.
44 kHz-class codecs — naturalness versus bitrate on a 9,291-clip wideband set. Higher is better on the vertical axis; further left is cheaper.

The gain over July is +0.131 UTMOSv2 at the same character error rate. Ground truth on this set sits at 2.822, which both the August release and NeMo-44k now pass.

The repository is on Hugging Face: Scicom-intl/WideCodec.

First published on LinkedIn, 19 August 2026, by Husein Zolkepli, VP Research. The figures are reproduced as published.

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