Which channel is best in stereo?

wazza

Friend of mine is deaf in his left ear. He has a mp3 player and uses the left speaker/channel to listen to. Couple of questions here ..

1. Is the left channel the better of the two in stereo?

2. if he uses audacity and changes the recording setting to mono will the two channels of stereo be recorded into one or will it only record the left channel.

thanks in advance for the replies given

DatabaseError

1. each audio stream contains discrete information, so neither left nor right is 'better' both are equally bad on their own 2. recorniong in mono will create mono recordings, ie both left and right channels combined, much better prospect. Why not modify his headphones by soldering the left + right channels together, creating dual mono? The lazy man's workaround would be a few strands of thin copper wire twisted around the narrow part of the headphone jack, and trailing far enough to contact the next ring on the jack, essentially shorting or joining the 2 channels, so long as the wire does not contact the long, negative section, it should work

Fifer

tonyhague wrote: »

1. each audio stream contains discrete information, so neither left nor right is 'better' both are equally bad on their own 2. recorniong in mono will create mono recordings, ie both left and right channels combined, much better prospect. Why not modify his headphones by soldering the left + right channels together, creating dual mono? The lazy man's workaround would be a few strands of thin copper wire twisted around the narrow part of the headphone jack, and trailing far enough to contact the next ring on the jack, essentially shorting or joining the 2 channels, so long as the wire does not contact the long, negative section, it should work

That's not a good idea. You would be connecting the outputs of both audio amplifiers together which is likely to cause damage to the output stages. Much better to convert the audio files to mono (or rip in mono in the first place).