Stereo 0r Joint? Noob question.

[Whitenoise]

Ok, so I have Switch, and it seems to work great. Basically I'm converting all my music files from whatever format they might be to mp3. I want the highest quality so in Encoder Options I selected Variable bitrate, min 128, max 320, 0(highest) Quality.

What I don't understand is the difference between Joint & Stereo in Channels. Which option gives the best quality?

[Guest nchto]

The following reply has been taking from this post: http://nch.invisionzone.com/index.php?show...post&p=5109. It can be located using the search functionality of this forum, or Google.

 

The terms "stereo" and "joint stereo" in mp3's for example, refer to how the channel volumes are recorded. It's a kind of difficult concept to explain but really all you need to know is that in stereo audio there are two different channels being played at once, left and right and each of these channels will have different values as the sound levels fluctuate and the music is played.

 

In a "stereo" recording, two completely separate values are stored and played through the two different channels, basically like this:

Left Right
78   87  
61   61  
70   67  
60   59  
89   88

The "joint stereo" is a much newer concept, however. It exploits the fact that a lot of the time, both channels have very similar signals and values being sent to them for playback and only records the difference from one channel as the values of the other channel. Joint stereo signal values are recorded something like this:

Left Right
78   +9  
61	0  
70   -3  
60   -1  
89   -1

 

Except of course, it's much more complex than this, but this explanation was just to give you a basic idea of how the two methods differ.

Because of the way joint stereo works, it requires less bits to produce a certain quality level than standard stereo does.