In a disclosed embodiment, a mobile unit includes a codec, a vocoder, and an audio decoder. The vocoder and the audio decoder provide respective outputs to an audio mux. A stereo/mono control unit receives an audio mux input from the audio mux. A control output generated by the stereo/mono control unit is coupled to a number of components in a receive audio processing path of the codec. By disabling at least one of the components in, for example, the right channel of the receive audio processing path of the codec, the control output of the stereo/mono control unit results in significant power savings. Such disabling can occur, for example, when the audio mux input received by the stereo/mono control unit contains voice signals, as opposed to music signals.