## An observation about how the OGG Opus CODEC may do Stereo.

One of the subjects which I’ve written about before, is the fact that the developers of the original OGG Vorbis form of music compression, have more recently developed the OGG Opus CODEC, which is partially the CELT CODEC. And, in studying the manpage on how to use the ‘opusenc’ command (under Linux), I ran across the following detail:


--no-phase-inv
Disable use of phase inversion for intensity stereo. This trades
some stereo quality for a higher quality mono  downmix,  and  is
useful when encoding stereo audio that is likely to be downmixed
to mono after decoding.



What does this mean? Let me explain.

I should first preface that with an admission, of the fact that an idea which was true for the original version of the Modified Discrete Cosine Transform, as introduced by MP3 compression and then reused frequently by other CODECs, may not always be the case. That idea was that, when defining monaural sound, each frequency coefficient needed to be signed. Because CELT uses a form of the Type 4 Discrete Cosine Transform which is only partially lapped, it may be that all the coefficients are assumed to be positive.

This will work as long as there is no destructive interference between the same coefficient, in the overlapping region, from one frame to the next, in spite of the half-sample shift of each frequency-value. Also, a hypotenuse function should be avoided, as that would present itself as distortion. One explicit way to achieve this could be, to rotate the reference-waves (n)·90° + 45° for coefficient (n):

Where ‘FN‘ refers to the current Frame-Number.

In general, modern compressed schemes will subdivide the audible spectrum into sub-bands, which in the case of CELT are referred to as its Critical Bands. And for each frame, the way stereo is encoded for each critical band, switches back and forth between X/Y intensity stereo, and Mid/Side stereo, which also just referred to as M/S stereo. What will happen with M/S stereo is, that the (L-R) channel has its own spectral shape, independent of the (L+R) channel’s, while with X/Y stereo, there is only one spectral pattern, which is reproduced by a linear factor, as both the (L+R) component, and the (L-R) component.

Even if the (L+R) is only being recorded as having positive DCT coefficients, with M/S stereo, the need persists for the (L-R) channel to be signed. Yet, even if M/S stereo is not taking place, implying that X/Y stereo is taking place, what can happen is that:

|L-R| > (L+R)

This would cause phase-inversion to take place between the two channels, (L) and (R). Apparently, a setting will prevent this from happening.

Further, because CELT has as its main feature, that it first states the amplitude of the critical band, and then a Code-Word which identifies the actual non-zero coefficients, which may only number 4, the setting may also affect critical bands for which M/S stereo is being used during any one frame. I’m not really sure if it does. But if it does, it will also make sure that the amplitude of the (L+R) critical band exceeds or equals that of the (L-R) critical band.

The way in which the CODEC decides, whether to encode the critical band using X/Y or M/S, for any one frame, is to detect the extent to which the non-zero coefficients coincide. If the majority of them do, encoding automatically switches to X/Y… Having said that, my own ideas on stereo perception are such that, if none of the coefficients coincide, it should not make any difference whether the specific coefficients belonging to the (L-R) channel are positive or negative. And finally, a feature which CELT could have enabled constantly, is to compute whether the (L-R) critical band correlates positively or negatively with the (L+R), independently of what the two amplitudes are. And this last observation suggests that even when encoding in M/S mode, the individual coefficients may not be signed.

(Update 10/03/2019, 9h30 … )