LAME joint stereo causes obvious difference: R channel is quiet/absent, [due to bad settings/was “Joint Stereo with Lame - strange behaviour”] Options

[Tokoloko]

Hello,
nomally I do my MP3 encoding with Lame using the Joint Stereo option. What I have learned so far is that there shouldn't be a big difference in sound quality between joint stereo and normal stereo (beside from what audiophile geeks think about the topic).
Now I notice that in my MP3's there is a easyly perceptible difference between joint stereo and normal stereo: It seems that the right channel is not really present (it sounds very far away and damp, but this could be a left-over from the left channel), and the left channel sounds loud as normal but in the middle and not left. You can download a wav and corresponding mp3 file (to hear what I mean) from here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18990880/JointStereoTest.zip (6MB)
This really surprises me, as it's really a big quality reduction of joint stereo. So, up to now, I think that I am doing something wrong in the encoding, but I did a lot of tweaking and nothing did change this effect.

Maybe someone is able to help me in this subject...

Thorsten

This post has been edited by Tokoloko: May 6 2012, 12:46

[mjb2006]

LAME gives you a lot of knobs to play with, but you really need very few of them. It's tempting to think you can research them all and use non-default settings and get better quality, but consensus here is that it's not that easy, and that the defaults are often exactly what you want. http://lame.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/lam...html/usage.html