Mono recordings

[demoleon]

I havce quite a few old mono recordings in my collection that I have ripped and converted to FLAC. I noticed that the channels parameter still says Stereo on these. So, I used the converter and DSP to recode these as mono FLAC. The file size is much smaller and from a quick listen on my computer they seem to sound the same. Is this true? If I were to convert all these mono tracks to true mono FLAC would I be missing anything? The space savings might be worth it!

Thanks,
John S.

[Tigerman]

Re: Mono recordings

In a mono recording the right & left channel should be the same. In this case the size of a stereo flac-file is not be much bigger than a mono flac-file. (the flac algorithm can see that both channels are the same and can compress this file very good)
However many old mono recordings are mastered poorly, so the right & left channel are slightly different causing a much bigger file size.
Making a mono flac-file will loose the difference between the channels, but that's in most cases not a loss.

In many cases it will sound even better than the stereo file.
This because many stereo files from a mono recording has the sound not exactly in the middle (hence the difference in right & left channel). With the mono-file the sound is exactly in the middle.

P.S. you should use head-phones to compare tracks