A method to denoise a stereo
signal comprising a stereo sum
signal and a stereo difference
signal, performs a frequency selective stereo to mono blending based on the masking effect of the
human auditory system. Therefore, a stereo signal
noise reducer, comprising a first
filter bank (1) to split the stereo difference signal (1−r) into a plurality of subbands, respective first multipliers (20, . . . , 2N) to weight each of the subbands of the stereo difference signal with a respective corresponding
control signal (C0, . . . , CN), and a first
adder (3) to sum all weighted subbands of the stereo difference signal (1−r) to build a frequency selective weighted stereo difference signal (diff), within which a number and width of the subbands obtained via the first
filter bank (1) are choosen according to the properties of the
human auditory system, further comprises
a weighting factor determination unit which determines a respective
control signal (C0, . . . , CN) frequency selective based on the masking effect of the
human auditory system.