16bit vs 24bit
Reply #55 – 2008-07-08 07:54:08
Really? And what if *all* of the "bits are quiet bits"? What if 98% of the time the recorded signal never peaks above -48dBFS? And that's just peak we're talking about there. What about if 99.9% of the time, peak RMS levels never reach above -60dBFS? I ask you... how many significant bits is 99.9% of your audio getting in the 16-bit domain on that recording? If you've never been asked to record extremely dynamic material, I can understand why you might think that. But you're wrong, because a 16 bit medium used to capture a signal that never peaks beyond -48dBFS will never have less than 8 zeros for MSB's, and never have more than 8 significant bits overall, unless post processing is performed to normalize or in some other way it is processed resulting in the creation of a mantissa based upon those 8 significant bits. Dither it all you want, noise shape it all you want, process it all you want you ain't gonna get blood from a stone, and you can't polish a turd. Why would you be in the situation where you are only using the lowest 8 bits of a 16 bit sampler to sample a signal that you actually wanted (or the lower 16 bits of a 24 bit sampler)? It seems a bit contrived that 99.9% of the time the signal does not exceed -60dBFS. Why not just increase the gain pre-sampling? What you seem to be trying to do is use a 16 bit sampler as an 8 bit sampler and then imply that 16 bit is bad, when the sampling situation causing the 8 bit effective sampling is seemingly artificial.