Forced vs. Joint Stereo

[studley]

Can some one describe what Forced Joint Stereo is and how it compares to Joint Stereo (and even traditional Stereo). I searched but couldn't find anything about it.

Thanks for your time.

David

[LtData]

Not sure about Forced, but here is Stereo versus Joint Stereo:
Joint Stereo - luckily for stereo compression sound on the left channel is very similar to sound on the right channel, Joint Stereo takes advantage of this similarity to use the savings on the 2nd channel to give higher quality compression.

Stereo - forces separate encoding of left and right channels, only recommended when high bitrates are used.