On 02/28/2012 04:20 PM, Takashi Iwai wrote:
I'm talking about recording an internal mic in *stereo*, as I just wrote below. Or don't you agree that is a valid and probably fairly common use case?
Well, when you record it in stereo, and play it back, then you hear the sound without problem.
That could definitely be questioned: depending on the distance between speakers when you're finally playing it back, you might lose bass frequencies [1]. (That said, I'm not sure how much bass these mics pick up anyway.)
The problem happens only when you sum the left and right signals into mono. Thus, as long as the stream is handled as stereo, it could be passed as is, although it's not optimal.
So the official recommendation is that summing left and right to make a mono signal, is to be considered an invalid operation?