Mid-side stereo

The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into [[::Joint stereo|Joint stereo]]. (Discuss)

Mid/side stereo-coding calculates a "mid"-channel by addition of left and right channel (l+r)/2 and a "side"-channel (l-r)/2. with more mono-like signals one can use less bitrate to encode the side-channel, so that the overall- bitrate will be less than encoding the left and right channel. Unlike intensity stereo which destroys phase information, mid/side coding keeps the phase information pretty much intact. Correctly implemented mid/side stereo does very little or no damage to the stereo-image and increases compression efficiency either by reducing size or increasing overall quality.