Any listening test Stereo vs Joint stereo in mp3? Options

[crazyman]

Hi all,

in many discussions I read about mp3 via Lame encoder the result is that the best solution is joint stereo. I believe in that as the developers who I highly esteem say so. But is this statement supported also by more independent listening tests? Especially I would be interested in comparison between --preset standard (joint stereo) and dtto with stereo mode.

Can the result in general depend also on the Lame version? From the tests I could read usually still the old good Lame 3.90.3 comes out as the winner.

Cheers,

Crazyman

[MugFunky]

guh, why has this myth never been dispelled?

it should be mentioned in the TOS or something.

[edit] something like "MS joint-stereo is not lossy! it's simply a way to decorellate data so it can be stored more efficiently". also mention that the lossy IS stereo mode is not implemented in LAME, and probably never will be.

for a start, just because DPL might bork your stereo image is no reason to pre-bork your mp3s. dolby pro-logic is not relevant for music that is mixed and mastered as stereo. and if it were mixed and mastered for DPL, i highly doubt (but cannot prove without an actual DPL decoder) that a preset-standard mp3's transparency will break on it. so pro-logic is no reason to encode in LR stereo. DPLII is much more sophisticated than DPL, but again, you'd be stupid to use it on stuff that wasn't meant for it (though apparently it's brilliant on SQ quad records though, having been heavily based on a quad decoder itself).

besides, MS can't be lossy if you're able to put an equals sign between it and LR - maths doesn't work that way. it's best to leave the decision of where to go LR and where to go MS to lame itself, rather than forcing it. after all, by forcing LR, you are disabling a feature of the encoder, rather than improving it.

This post has been edited by MugFunky: Jan 20 2005, 06:32

[DreamTactix291]

guh, why has this myth never been dispelled?

No idea. Even when I was a newbie after I'd read about the L/R to M/S process I understood it once. Just two ways to express the same data and letting the encoder pick which one is more efficient is what LAME does in its joint stereo mode.

I agree that somewhere this should be posted where it is obvious that using M/S stereo is not lossy. If it was certain lossless encoders couldn't use it (I know one does but I can't remember which one)