I recently introduced my friend to MPC and he was disappointed to learn MPC --insane is Joint Stereo.

He metioned a track by Velvet Underground, The Gift. This track has a story on one of the stereo channels and music in the other, my friend used to enjoy shifting the balance all the way to one side when playing a full stereo mp3 and just listen to the story.

My question is will this still work with MPC at --insane and if so how ? He says he tried a JS mp3 rip and it did not sound that way - the channels were all mixed together.

Pls & Thanks

Joint Stereo doesn't 'mix channels together'.

Must have been Intensity stereo (IS), joint stereo (MS) doesn't suffer of stereo separation issues.

I can assure you actually...

I have this very track playing right now, compressed with lame --alt-preset standard (uses joint stereo)

The stereo separation is 100% preserved. Not the slightest bit of music leaks through to the story channel, and vice-versa (assuming this is the 1996 release, on the earlier one there was some channel bleeding on the original disc).

LAME's joint stereo mode (and MPC's, I assume) only encode as js when the difference (side) and combination (mid) channels contains less information than the left and right channels would have. For a song like this, only LR frames are used, since the side channel would be huge (no similarities cancelling out).

Joint stereo is lossless. Intensity stereo, used by lesser MP3 codecs on low-bitrate encodes, is lossy. Joint stereo though is just good. No reason to avoid it at all. In fact, it saves bits for use in other, more imporant things.

Thanks

My friend has read this thread now and feels alot better about MPC and JS.

He thinks he must have just had a bad rip of The Gift.

Thanks again

I would highly recommend against him using MPC at -insane. It's called that for a reason. -standard MPCs are so totally impossible to spot that there is just no reason to go higher.

Oh, and lots of MP3 encoders have trouble with joint stereo. some use intensity stereo (only call it JS), and some just do mid-side stereo badly. LAME is considered perfect in this respect, so if he wants MP3s, they can sound good too.

The JS implementation in Xing (AudioCatalyst) sucks more than everything that sucked before and moreover will suck until the end of time when it comes to audio compression (xcept for old WMA@64 which sucked even harder*). JS will work properly with a decent mp3 encoder (FHG or LAME). Will work for sure with mpc (ms stereo if I remember correctly).

edit: gotta get some sleep tough...