eess.ASMar 7, 2026
SaveFast and Flexible Audio Bandwidth Extension via Vocos
Abstract
We propose a Vocos-based bandwidth extension model that enhances audio at 8-48 kHz by generating missing high-frequency content. Inputs are resampled to 48 kHz and processed by a neural vocoder backbone, enabling a single network to support arbitrary upsampling ratios. A lightweight Linkwitz-Riley-inspired refiner merges the original low band with the generated high frequencies via a smooth crossover. On validation, the model achieves competitive log-spectral distance while running at a real-time factor of 0.0001 on an NVIDIA A100 GPU and 0.0053 on an 8-core CPU, demonstrating practical, high-quality BWE at extreme throughput.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of the proposed BWE architecture following the Vocos framework. The input audio is upsampled to 48 kHz via Sinc interpolation and transformed into an 80-bin Mel-spectrogram. The backbone consists of 8 ConvNeXt blocks using depthwise and pointwise convolutions. The head employs a linear layer and ISTFT for waveform reconstruction, followed by a Linkwitz-Riley inspired refiner for significant quality enhancement.
| Method | 8 48 kHz (LSD ) | 12 48 kHz (LSD ) | 16 48 kHz (LSD ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sinc upsampling | 3.52 | 3.19 | 2.94 |
| AudioSR | 1.61 | 1.52 | 1.44 |
| NVSR | 1.22 | 1.20 | 1.12 |
| AP-BWE | 0.87 | 0.81 | 0.74 |
| Proposed Model | 0.85 | 0.80 | 0.74 |
Table 1: Log-spectral distance (LSD) comparison on VCTK. Our model achieves very competitive spectral reconstruction across all tiers.
| Method | 8 48 kHz (ViSQOL ) | 12 48 kHz (ViSQOL ) | 16 48 kHz (ViSQOL ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sinc upsampling | 2.10 | 2.23 | 2.35 |
| AudioSR | 3.15 | 3.21 | 3.40 |
| NVSR | 2.97 | 3.00 | 3.10 |
| AP-BWE | 3.51 | 3.54 | 3.70 |
| Proposed Model | 3.51 | 3.53 | 3.69 |
Table 2: ViSQOL scores on VCTK. Our model is similar to AP-BWE’s perceptual quality.
Figure 2: Model performance (LSD) across in-domain and out-of-domain (OOD) sample rates. The curve demonstrates a linear improvement in fidelity as input bandwidth increases, regardless of whether the rate was seen during training.
| Refiner Variant | LSD (8 48) |
|---|---|
| No Refiner (Direct Output) | 0.897 |
| Naive HP/LP Crossover | 0.865 |
| Standard Butterworth Refiner | 0.861 |
| Linkwitz-Riley Inspired (Proposed) | 0.850 |
Table 3: Ablation results on VCTK validation. The proposed refiner achieves the lowest spectral distance by ensuring a flat magnitude response at the crossover.
| Method | Params | RTF | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|
| AudioSR | 258M | 50.0000 | 0.02 |
| NVSR | 99M | 0.2218 | 4.5 |
| AP-BWE | 3*30M | 0.0495 | 20.2 |
| Proposed | 15M | 0.0053 | 190.5 |
Table 4: Inference efficiency comparison on 8-core CPU. RTF is measured as . .
| Method | BS | Latency (s) | RTF | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AudioSR | 1 | 8.4700 | 2.1175 | 0.47 |
| NVSR | 1 | 0.0410 | 0.0103 | 97.6 |
| AP-BWE | 1 | 0.0135 | 0.0034 | 296.3 |
| AP-BWE | 32 | 0.2879 | 0.0023 | 444.6 |
| Proposed | 1 | 0.0025 | 0.0006 | 1600.0 |
| Proposed | 32 | 0.0102 | 0.0001 | 12549.0 |
Table 5: GPU Efficiency and throughput comparison on NVIDIA A100. Latency is reported for the entire batch. RTF is rounded and calculated as .
Bandwidth extension, the task of reconstructing the high-frequency components of an audio signal from its low-passed counterpart, is a long-standing problem in audio processing. In this work, we extend recent advances in neural architectures by framing bandwidth extension as an audio token prediction problem. Specifically, we train a transformer-based language model on the discrete representations produced by a disentangled neural audio codec, where the disentanglement is guided by a Harmonic-Percussive decomposition of the input signals, highlighting spectral structures particularly relevant for bandwidth extension. Our approach introduces a novel codec design that explicitly accounts for the downstream token prediction task, enabling a more effective coupling between codec structure and transformer modeling. This joint design yields high-quality reconstructions of the original signal, as measured by both objective metrics and subjective evaluations. These results highlight the importance of aligning codec disentanglement and representation learning with the generative modeling stage, and demonstrate the potential of global, representation-aware design for advancing bandwidth extension.
AnyBand: Unified Multi-Bandwidth Speech Extension via Frequency-Aware In-Context Spectral Infilling
Bandwidth extension (BWE) aims to recover missing high-frequency content from band-limited speech. Existing methods often formulate BWE as a fixed or predefined bandwidth conversion problem, potentially requiring cutoff-specific models or retraining when the input bandwidth changes. This assumption limits their applicability to practical scenarios where speech may arrive with diverse cutoff frequencies. We propose AnyBand, a unified BWE framework that recasts bandwidth extension as in-context spectral infilling. Motivated by prompt-based zero-shot speech generation, AnyBand conditions high-frequency generation on the observed low-frequency spectrum, using the available band as a frequency-domain prompt that conveys content, speaker, prosodic, and spectral-envelope cues. This formulation enables a single model to perform cutoff-conditioned generation over a continuous range of input bandwidths. AnyBand is trained with missing-band conditional flow matching and an Easy-to-Balanced cutoff curriculum over continuously sampled cutoff frequencies. To better exploit the spectral prompt, we introduce a frequency-aware Diffusion Transformer that models cross-frequency interactions and long-range temporal dependencies, followed by a physically motivated multi-view adversarial refinement stage to enhance spectral realism, envelope coherence, and harmonic consistency. Experiments on multiple datasets and bandwidth settings show that AnyBand consistently improves spectral reconstruction over existing baselines while achieving competitive perceptual quality across both standard and irregular input cutoffs. Audio samples are available.
Harmonic-Percussive Disentangled Neural Audio Codec for Bandwidth Extension
Bandwidth extension, the task of reconstructing the high-frequency components of an audio signal from its low-passed counterpart, is a long-standing problem in audio processing. In this work, we extend recent advances in neural architectures by framing bandwidth extension as an audio token prediction problem. Specifically, we train a transformer-based language model on the discrete representations produced by a disentangled neural audio codec, where the disentanglement is guided by a Harmonic-Percussive decomposition of the input signals, highlighting spectral structures particularly relevant for bandwidth extension. Our approach introduces a novel codec design that explicitly accounts for the downstream token prediction task, enabling a more effective coupling between codec structure and transformer modeling. This joint design yields high-quality reconstructions of the original signal, as measured by both objective metrics and subjective evaluations. These results highlight the importance of aligning codec disentanglement and representation learning with the generative modeling stage, and demonstrate the potential of global, representation-aware design for advancing bandwidth extension.