What is the difference between stereo and joint stereo

Intensity stereo is used only at low bitrates, and as far as I know, only by Fraunhofer encoders. The cost? There may be a slight degradation in stereo image, but I doubt you'll notice. The benefits? It may lessen the appearance of nasty, noticable artifacts. Don't quote me on that, though. Mike Listening to: '1.

JorgeGVB Guest. How are you determining you have Joint Stereo MP3s or not? It seems most of my MP3s are Joint Stereo. Is there a way to control this within MJ? EncSpot is an application which reports useful facts about your MP3 collection. One good feature is its ability to determine which encoder was used to encode each file. It will also give you a general idea of the audio quality of the file. If you click on a file, Properties, and then click on the format tab the 3rd info line will tell you how it was encoded.

Done a lot of research on this. Joint stereo should have a "better" sound when encoding MP3s with lower bit rates. Meaning or under. Joint stereo is to take advantage of of similarities between the R and L channels and allows more bits to be used in other areas. There is less speration, but a better sound. For high quality encoding, bitrates and above joint stereo should NOT be used. As a matter of fact, it definately could have a negative effect, like distortion and loss of stereo seperation.

Grant , Jul 1, Location: Atlanta, GA. GreenDrazi , Jul 1, Probably a mono track which has just dither differences in each channel. DragonQ , Jul 1, Stateless , Jul 1, Location: Everett, WA. Location: Spain EU. Metoo , Jul 2, DragonQ , Jul 2, There's been a lot of misinfo about joint stereo on the web over the past decade.

Lots of wrong info. It's no wonder people are confused. Here's an old web page about joint stereo myths it's captured here on the wayback machine.

The wikipedia article on joint stereo also touches a bit on basic info. Much of the confusion is probably due to there being two types of joint stereo used in MP3. Both got lumped in with being called joint stereo with MP3. The myths article and the wikipedia article explain what intensity stereo is. It's lossy. Encoding to intensity stereo loses information. Further, only the files of that middle channel are encoded. The difference between joint stereo and stereo depends on many factors. Certain tools will not allow you to extract audio files in one of the ways, usually, joint stereo.

Finally, you can try both methods and see whether there is a big difference in sounding. If joint stereo with significantly optimized storage space does not harm the quality of the audio too much, the decision is obvious! So you might ask yourself: Why do I need to learn about the tech differences of stereo and joint stereo? For instance, when you export your audio track, you will be asked to choose from the options below: Here is when you will need to understand the difference between joint stereo and stereo, as it will influence the choice of your file format.

What bitrate should I choose for my podcasts? Stereo A stereo is an audio file that is produced from two different channels.

Joint Stereo Joint stereo is the more optimized version of stereo and is designed to produce the same stereo signal with a smaller-size audio file. Joint stereo can be encoded mainly in two ways. Intensity Stereo The Right and Left audio channels are combined into the mono channel and encoded at a unified frequency. Can we say which one is better for sure? Most probably, no. Share this article:. The link has been Copied to clipboard!

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