First, I’m aware of the guidelines and have been following them. This is a question more along the lines as to why the guidelines are the way they are or what relationships can be added to help distinguish them.
Example:
As you see we have a recording that according to guidelines is correct. Now guidelines state that if a different mix occurs than it’s a different recording, however, it exempts from this different channels.
shows that there were mock stereo recordings made from the original mix. However, same recording according to guidelines. As you can see our source shows DATES for the remixes. How do we handle this? Currently there seems to be no way to without creating a mock stereo recording, which is against guidelines. Also, why is a remix from mono to mock stereo treated differently than say, a remix of the original mix that was in stereo in 1965 to a stereo remix in 2015?
They do that, but then they add a small delay, different filters on the left and right channels, possibly some echo, etc. Read this Wikipedia page for more info: Duophonic
I was wondering the same thing. It’s the same mix, just mastered differently. But I think it would probably be better if we treated them like a different mixes…
Just wondering, “Duophonic” was actually a process during the 60’s & 70’s. So now when a track is changed to mp3 I notice it sometimes becomes “joint stereo”. So wouldn’t that kinda be considered “mock or fake” stereo too?
One of the compression cheats of MP3. Throw away half the data and pretend the user only has one ear. I’m a Pink Floyd fan and so many albums would loose so much of the detail when splattered like that.
“Joint Stereo” isn’t just “fake stereo” it is also “fake music” as it is a bad approximation of the original. Music quality is outside of the interest of the MB database as it treats “Digital Media” as one big mass no matter if streamed \ FLAC \ mp3 or whatever.
The OP was referring to the officially released versions. Whereas MP3 and Joint Stereo is processing the user has done to their music. “Duophonic” was an attempt to upgrade the older Mono music to work in the modern Stereo systems. Whereas MP3 is about downgrading by throwing data away to avoid paying for more storage.
That is not doing justice to what joint-stereo means in respect to mp3.
It describes the manner in which the stereo signal is encoded.
It’s a clever system that looks at the differences between the left and right channel.
It makes the encoding more efficient, with results in a (usually) better sound quality.
It’s not designed to make stereo less-stereo.
The other option is using full-stereo, but since that takes more bandwidth, it will usually result in a worse sound quality compared to joint-stereo.
So it looks like there are two discussions going on here:
Is lossy audio of a lower quality then lossless audio?
Yes
Is a joint-stereo mp3 worse than a full-stereo mp3?
No, usually it’s better.
