Abstract: The invention relates to the technical field of audio encoding and/or decoding technologies, and thus concerns an overall encoding procedure and associated decoding procedure. The encoding procedure involves at least two signal encoding processes (S1-S3) operating on signal representations of a set of audio input channels, as well as residual encoding (S7-S8). It also involves a dedicated process (S4-S6) to estimate and encode energies of the audio input channels. Each encoding process is associated with a corresponding decoding process. In the overall decoding procedure the decoded signals from each encoding process are preferably combined such that the output channels are close to the input channels in terms of energy and/or quality. Normally, the combination step also adapts to the possible loss of one or more signal representation in part or in whole, such that the energy and quality is optimized with the signals at hand in the decoder. In this way, the overall quality of the output channels is improved.