Mono Vs Stereo Comparision Help Please

[C jOker]

I was recording earlier (not more then 5 minutes ago) and I went to mix, first my room is untreated so i need to add more **** to make it sound halfway decent, but thats beyond the topic. So i get to mixing the first verse to see how its sounding so far, I export it and low and behold it sounds ****tier then when it was on the program in multitrack view.

So i thought it was just the first time, did it again and again it came out ****ty, so i changed the format im exporting to and found out my .wav doesnt play on that specific computer, so i go back to .mp3 but instead this time i mix out with a mono mix then a stereo mix and it comes out how it sounded on the multi track view.

My question is, why would it sound better on mono then a stereo track ?

 

[danny.guitar]

Seems strange that your mix would sound better in mono than stereo. When exporting as WAV, keep the sample rate and bit depth the same as your project. MP3 will no doubt sound shittier than the WAV file, especially 128KBPS or below. 192 or above is ok.

Most media players won't play WAV files higher than 16 bit. For example, Windows Media Player won't play 24-bit WAV files without downloading the codec. So if you want to play the WAV file on your media player or burn to a CD then you probably want to export as 44.1KHz/16-bit PCM Uncompressed WAV (Stereo).

 

[Freddy]

When going to MP3 you have 4 options for stereo/mono (using LAME):

Mono
Stereo
Joint Stereo
Multi-Channel

I have had problems with Stereo too. Joint Stereo often comes out better, especially at lower bit rates.

Joint Stereo goes through a lossless translation to MS as I understand it. Having done that it seems to suffer from less from the MP3 compression.

Mono avoids disrupting the stereo image altogether, but the quality is reduced.

I would try Joint Stereo too.

 

[legionserial]

Most media players won't play WAV files higher than 16 bit. For example, Windows Media Player won't play 24-bit WAV files without downloading the codec. So if you want to play the WAV file on your media player or burn to a CD then you probably want to export as 44.1KHz/16-bit PCM Uncompressed WAV (Stereo).

Or just download winamp.