16bit vs 24bit, Rubbish or Truth? Options

[Bourne]

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This post has been edited by Bourne: Apr 2 2008, 19:26

[Pandabear]

Bourne - everyone's ears develop at their own pace. Applied practice of reliable listening tests with controlled data, one audio sample against another, is needed to begin to pick up fine differences such as bit depth nuances.

Dan Heend is a digital recording pioneer who's article is still relevant today. It's hard to find good teachers in this field these days but Dan is apparently one of them. I'm interested to hear what he has to say on the topic of jitter.

It's a load of pseudo science. The guy has a hobbyists interest, has heard some audiophile bull, but has no understanding of the theory.

Of course circa 1990 8-bit audio sounded awful. It was sampled at goodness know what rate, typically with no dithering, no anti-alias filters on record, and no anti-image filters on playback.

However, Correctly generated 44.1kHz sampled 8-bit audio (e.g. from foobar set to convert to 8-bits) has the one and only problem that's created by having too low a resolution: noise. No distortion, no loss of fine detail, no grittiness or grainy character - just background noise, plain and simple. Human listeners can hear through a surprising amount of noise.

_any_ correctly sampled digital audio has the same issues - a bandwidth limit and a noise limit. 16-bit audio has noise at -96dB FS RMS.

I'm sure you're aware of the extensive threads in the FAQ that cover this subject in horrendous detail.

Of course, given the limitations and issues with field recording, the lower noise floor of 24-bit digital audio is genuinely useful. You can set your levels conservatively, and easily avoid clipping while keeping everything way above the digital noise floor. With very good microphones and pre-amps, and a need to record without compression or processing or even a perfect idea of the levels which will hit the microphone, and wishing to avoiding clipping, 16-bits could be considered an issue.

Cheers,
David.

EDIT: Reading down, this person doesn't understand dither. He's bought the bogus argument that is "masks" distortion, rather than eliminating it. No wonder he's so confused.

EDIT2: Oh dear, he thinks Nyquist is something to do with the limits of human hearing. He thinks noise shaped dither is useful because the noise may be later filtered out.

EDIT3: And it's rather out of date. I think most of us are now managing to run IE and MS Office without it preventing us using our PCs successfully for audio!

No one understands what you've written here.

[Synthetic Soul]

No one understands what you've written here.

Please do not speak for the group. If you do not comprehend something ask for assistance. Enough said on this.