How will an MPEG-1 decoder get information from all channels when receiving an MPEG-2 Audio bitstream?
An MPEG-1 decoder will be supplied with an appropriate two-channel downmix of all the channels in the multichannel ensemble, contained in the MPEG-1 core of the MPEG-2 bitstream. The left and right channel of the downmix together contain components of all the channels, according to the equations in the compatibility matrix.