I would say this book is a five star book if you are a researcher in any of the following areas: speech acquisition and enhancement, acoustic echo cancellation, sound source tracking and estimation, or audio coding and sound stage representation. The math is very clear for one of these academic books written by committee with some good examples. I really don't know where the "multimedia communication systems" part of the title came from, though. Communications is never addressed in this book, so networking researchers and students should look elsewhere. If you are a DSP student interested in audio signal processing in general, this is also not the book for you. You will be completely confused from page 1 as the authors dive into specialized DSP research topics you were not anticipating. If you fall into this last category, my advice is to buy a copy of "Discrete Time Signal Processing 2nd Edition" by Oppenheim, Schafer and Buck. Make sure you understand it and then keep it around for a reference. Then buy Zolzer's "Digital Audio Signal Processing" for a good text on the hardware and software algorithms of audio DSP.