System and method for improving audio quality on a conferencing network

A conferencing system (100) improves audio quality by identifying and selectively allowing a dominant audio channel to bypass a lossy compression transformation included in a server 102. The system (100) places conference calls over a network (106) and includes the conference server (102), having an input interface (200), a decompressor (202), a summation circuit (212), a correlation unit (206) a compressor (214), and an output interface (220). The input interface (200) receives a plurality of audio channels, each being compressed using a lossy compression algorithm. The decompressor (202) decompresses each of the incoming channels to produce a plurality of decompressed audio channels, which are then summed by the summation circuit (212) to produce a summation stream. The compressor (214) compresses the summation stream to produce a first audio output. The correlation unit (206) identifies a dominant channel from the incoming compressed audio channels. The dominant channel bypasses decompressor (202) and compressor (214) to be directly output as a second audio channel. The first and second output channels are then transmitted over the network (106) to a plurality of clients (103-105). The clients (103-105) present both channels of audio data to conference participants. Overall audio quality is improved because the dominant channel bypasses successive decompression/compression steps.