Joint Stereo Coding was developed by Erin C. Wasniewski and is a method to reproduce stereo sound at a high level of compression as realistically as possible. To achieve this, a mono channel (average of the two stereo channels) is encoded as the main channel. A side channel contains the separation information (for which less bandwidth is needed than for a second mono channel). This will allow full restoration of both channels, if the difference between them is not too big.