Subband coding decomposes a source signal into constituent frequency bands using digital filters like low-pass and high-pass filters. This separation into subbands allows each frequency component to be encoded and decoded separately, improving compression performance over techniques that treat the whole signal as one. The basic subband coding algorithm involves analysis using filtering and decimation to separate the signal, quantization and coding of the subband signals, and synthesis by decoding, upsampling and reconstruction filtering to reconstruct the original signal. Applications of subband coding include speech coding, audio coding and image compression, with MPEG audio standards using subband coding with 32 filters and bandwidths of f/64.