Hi, i have a question is Joint Stereo Lossless? Because I went around reading in a heap of different forums saying that its lossless, although some say its not and some say there both lossy and so on and so forth. etc etc.

thanks

Joint stereo as implemented by the LAME MP3 encoder is lossless (apart from the lossyness of the MP3 encoding itself). I'm not sure if the same is true for all other encoders.

Welcome to CDFreaks!

Joint stereo throws away some phase information between the channels (apparently) ..

Mp3 is lossy by definition, so you might as well use JS for best compression results.

Not true, that is not what "Joint Stereo" means in the usual MP3 terminology. You are probably thinking of "Intensity Stereo" for low bit-rate encoding.
A few encoders may use different terminology with Joint Stereo meaning something else.

Joint Stereo allows the encoder to decide when to use Left/Right stereo encoding and when to use Mid/Side stereo encoding - hence the "joint" stereo.

Here's an interesting read on the subject:

Joint Stereo: The Myths ... and the Realities!

You'll find an earlier post I made about this with some followup clarifications(?).

Aye .. clarification (and translation for those that don't feel like reading the article)... Joint Stereo at 96Kbps or lower for most encoders, or any bitrate for the Xing encoder destroys Phase Information - for higher frequencies only.

Humans have poor directional hearing for very low frequencies & very high frequencies, so it doesn't matter to 99% of the population.

Most Encoders (not the xing encoder) now use L+R & L-R encoding for Joint stereo, thereby giving a larger proportion of the bit rate for the major signal (L+R) & remainder for (L-R) giving better clarity overall.

At any rate, Joint Stereo is the way to go for MP3 .. there's no real reason not to use it .. unless you are a hardcore audiophile and/or ignorant
Joint Stereo pontentially provides BETTER quality than standard stereo encoding, for any given bitrate.

MP3 is a Lossy audio codec, meaning i throws away anything it calculates as inaudible.
If lossless encoding is what you need, use a lossless codec.

On a sidenote .. Did BK ever understand why JS was better than normal stereo?

Yes, at least the same quality but usually better, because the bits saved by intelligent stereo coding can be used to improve overall sound quality.

There's a saying: "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink."

Mp3 is lossy. There is no question about that

I use Preset Insane for private .mp3 backup and it's very good. Best mp3 and not JS
When that isn't good enough i use .flac or .wav. .wav when i fell i have lots of space

Check again. Preset Insane uses Joint Stereo too.

Hey thanks for those links Drage - it's taken me a few days to get time to read them, but I learned something new there