Hi All,

I searched Doom9 for answers about the best audio (stereo, joint stereo,
and dual channel) for mp2. The confusion about which was the best could
keep you reading for every. What I could gleen, most agreed that Dual
Channel was useful for carring two languages since it splits
the audio bitrate between left and right channel (i.e. 128kb is 64kb right and
64kb left.) This means I can switch to English from one channel or French
on the other. But as for better sound quality DC is less then stereo and
joint stereo. Most felt that Joint Stereo was the best choice overall. I read
a post by Kwag that it's always best to use Dual Channel. Can this always
be true ???

Thankx

I know that explanation at doom9, and it's messed up
There is no difference in bit rate between stereo or dual-channel. Quality wise, at lower bit rates, joint-stereo wins. But then you loose "Dolby Surround" information. The best "Stereo" mode is indeed "Dual-channel"
You can try it yourself very quickly. Encode say 60 seconds of audio in stereo, and the same 60 seconds dual-channel. Difference in file size? None. So you have the same bit rate for both. The difference is that in dual channel there's no "cross channel" of relation from left to right or right to left. No "bleeding" or "cross talk" between channels at all. That's why it's perfect for two separate languages. If you try two languages with stereo, say spanish on left track and english on right track, when you play back and you switch your balance complete to say right channel, you'll still hear audio artifacts from the adjacent channel. This doesn't happen in dual channel mode, and that's why it's ideal as "Dolby Surround" carrier for our (XYX)VCD's Hope that was clear

-kwag

Hi Kwag,

You are right.
I tried 60 seconds of "The Matrix" using Stereo, Joint Stereo and
Dual Channel. Dual Channel is the best quality compared to the
others. It's similar to surround sound quality. It seems that
BeSweet does not support dual channel using 2lame. Another
reason to use Headac3he. I extracted audio from Divx(avi) using
VirtualDub as wav (which was really mp3 with a wav header).
Tried to convert the renamed .mp3 to wav uncompressed using
BeSweet since Headac3he wouldn't convert it. Then used Headac3he
to convert wav to mp2 dual channel.

Thankx