Thread: Joint Stereo Vs. Stereo

ALWAYS stereo, NEVER joint-stereo. Why? Joint-stereo works by using the difference between the left and right channels to its advantage to increase compression, but you suffer by lowering the seperation between channels. For example if you had a source recording with a vocal on totally the left channel, after joint-stereo encoding you would most likey find some of that vocal has crepped into the right channel... therefore you are really loosing that sense of relisim and definition in the music which sterophonic recording provides. Of course the type of source audio will have a bearing on how noticible this is......

if your really trying to save space with 128kps or lower mp3's then maybe give it a shot, but for 192kps or higher, using joint-stereo sort of defeats the purpose....

Joint stereo mode was created for a reason. 128kbps and below just doesn't contain enough information to reproduce the full stereo effect very well.

There are 2 main issues here

1) The amount of "stereo effect"

2) Minimising annoying sound artifacts

As magnetik pointed out, Joint stereo sacrafices the original full stereo effect for a narrower effect. It does this so more of the bitrate can be assigned to reproducing the music with more accuracy.

It is best to use joint stereo with bitrates below 192kbps to minimise annoying sound artifacts despite the narrower stereo effect. Better a narrow OK sound than a nasty wide sound.

Above 192kbps there is sufficient bitrate to give both good quality AND the full original stereo effect. With high bitrates you can "have your cake and eat it too"

Personally I have always used 256kbps "Stereo" after a lot of comparison testing I did 5 years ago. It always sounds awesome and with the size of hard drives rocketing, I see no reason to use a lower bitrate. I currently use the Lame encoder which is excellent.

Thanks guys! Much appreciated... you have given me a little more understanding of the bigger picture and helped my curiousity. Ta!

-Alex