I will make my humble attempt to explain the difference between mono streaming and stereo streaming. apologies if im not entire spot on but i believe i have captured the essence of it.
When sound is recordedā¦high quality recording typically places microphones at different parts of the room to the capture the full scope of sounds and also directions the sound is coming from.
In mono streaming - what they do is they combine all the sounds onto the one channel. You still get all the sounds but you lose the directionality. This is sometimes called one channel streaming. This is not to be confused with monaural hearing which is hearing via one ear.
In Stereo streaming, stereo surround or hi fedelity quality. (and not to be confused with binaural listening which is hearing in both ears)ā¦the audio system is making full use of the sounds available. It is using 2 channels - it sends the sounds received by one microphone during the recording to one ear and the sounds sent by another microphone to the other ear. The result means you might hear the drums stronger in one ear and the guitar or piano stronger on the other ear. Like if you were standing in the middle of an orchestra and you had the percussionist on one side of the room and the violinist on the other side of the room. You would expect the sounds to vary on how close or far away they are from you and where they are playing from relative to your location.
So in sum - mono captures everything but puts it onto one stream. People find this quality sounds missing something. Sometimes described as a bit flat or dead.
Stereo splits the recording onto two streams. Leading to a more realistic listening experience or more lively.