HydrogenAudio

Lossy Audio Compression => MP3 => MP3 - Tech => Topic started by: dirk-hq on 2020-07-29 14:34:18

Title: Stereo or Joint Stereo with leadvoice panning
Post by: dirk-hq on 2020-07-29 14:34:18
Hey! ;D
 I'm using foobar2000 and lame3.100-64.
I want to work on several files with leadvoices panning from left to right / front to back.
My preset is "-S --noreplaygain -b 32 -m j -p  -V 0 -B 320 -q 0 - %d".
Is Joint Stereo better than Stereo? I'm interest in quality, the size is second nature for me.
THX Dirk

Title: Re: Stereo or Joint Stereo with leadvoice panning
Post by: DVDdoug on 2020-07-29 15:20:09
Joint Stereo is better.*    Information that's common to left & right is only encoded/stored once allowing the compression algorithm to make better use of the "bits".   With regular stereo at 320kbps, each side is getting 160kbps.

That part of the process (converting L & R to L+R & L-R) is lossless and completely reversible.

Joint stereo is "smart" so it only does that when there is enough common information for it to make sense.  For example, if you have English  dialog on one side and French on the other it will be encoded as regular stereo even if you've selected joint stereo.   






* With lossy compression we can't really say it's "better" unless it actually sounds better and that's not always the case.  Similarly, we can't say 320kbps is better than 192kbps if they sound identical.
Title: Re: Stereo or Joint Stereo with leadvoice panning
Post by: dirk-hq on 2020-07-29 16:32:58
Cool thank you and you're right, as it's a streaming-protocol witk vbr you can have frame containing more than 320 bit.
THX Dirk
Title: Re: Stereo or Joint Stereo with leadvoice panning
Post by: [JAZ] on 2020-07-30 19:28:39
My preset is "-S --noreplaygain -b 32 -m j -p  -V 0 -B 320 -q 0 - %d".
Is Joint Stereo better than Stereo? I'm interest in quality, the size is second nature for me.



Looks like you just need -S --noreplaygain -V0 - %d
(and --noreplaygain here only means faster encoding and leaving the replaygain task to foobar2000. )



Cool thank you and you're right, as it's a streaming-protocol witk vbr you can have frame containing more than 320 bit.
THX Dirk


If anything, the opposite of what you said is true, but the whole sentence is probably wrong anyway.

In fact, there are some compatibility modes in LAME because the older frauhoffer decoder on Windows could not have more than ~6000something bits for a frame so the "use more than an equivalent 320kbps" is just "not much more than that".