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HOME THEATER'S AV GLOSSARY

M

Megachanger: CD or DVD player with massive disc storage capacity, holding 50 or more discs.
MHz: Megahertz, or 1 million Hz.
Midbass: The middle of the bass part of the frequency range, from approximately 50 to 100 Hz (upper bass would be from 100 to 200 Hz). Also used as a term for loudspeaker drivers designed to reproduce both bass and midrange frequencies.
Midrange: The middle of the audio frequency range. Also used as a term for loudspeaker drivers designed to reproduce this range.
MLP: Meridian Lossless Packing. Encoding format that is able to completely reconstruct the original signal at the receiving end. No information is lost or discarded, regardless of how trivial it might be. Used to encode six channels of high-resolution audio on DVD-A.
Mono: Monophonic sound. One channel.
MP3: MPEG-1 Audio Layer-3. Compression scheme used to transfer audio files via the Internet and store in portable players and digital audio servers.
Multiple-Rate Encoding: Instead of locking encoding at a certain constant data rate, it allows the codec to choose whatever rate is best for that portion of the recording. Usually reduces file size with proportionally less loss in quality.
Multisource: System with multiple sources. Can also be used to describe a receiver that can provide multiple different sources into different rooms.
Multiroom: System that provides audio or video to multiple areas. Usually with only one source.
Multizone: System that provides different sources into multiple areas simultaneously.