But in many ways it's easier to just tell FLAC, for example, to ignore the least important 4 bits when it does compression. And that would reduce uncompressed file sizes by about 16%. You could, in theory, pack the "leftover" 4 bit portion (called-I'm not joking-a "nibble" in reference to being a portion of a "byte") into a more conventional data "word". So once you go past 16 bits, you might as well go to 24 bits.
![wavelab 6 not enough space for dithering wavelab 6 not enough space for dithering](https://phandroid.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/chrome.jpg)
The problem is pretty much *all* digital devices have to store and manipulate things in increments of at least 8 bits. And, so far, most blind listening tests of 16 vs 24 bit have found no advantage to 24 You are correct 20 bits is a sweet spot for real world dynamic range. Otherwise, with an open format, it would be trivial to verify if they have an audible advantage. If they do, it will be more difficult to do a blind comparison than simply using something like Foobar and ABX. The interesting thing, to me, will be if Apple uses DRM and/or some proprietary Apple-only format, for their 24 bit tracks. But will 99% of Apple's 24 bit files have an audible advantage? I doubt it. And, if you crank in enough gain at certain points along the way, 16 bits might not be enough to prevent audible noise. So it's certainly possible to produce recordings with a really low noise floor.
WAVELAB 6 NOT ENOUGH SPACE FOR DITHERING 64 BIT
And those tools typically use 32 or 64 bit internal processing to avoid degradation, rounding errors, etc.
WAVELAB 6 NOT ENOUGH SPACE FOR DITHERING PRO
All the mixing and signal processing is then done using software like Sound Forge, Pro Tools, Wavelab, etc. The microphones (and/or musical instruments) are often connected to high quality A/D converters and each is recorded digitally to it's own track-typically in 24/96 format. Increasingly, music is being recorded with a very short and limited analog signal path. Headphones that offer significant isolation are especially relentless at revealing noise as they can lower the ambient background noise by 20+ dB. And there's also the inherent noise in the playback signal path and ambient environment.
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This includes the microphone preamps, the A/D converters, any mixers used, signal processing software or equipment, etc. In such an instance, the 24 bit recording may yield an audibly better result as it may have a lower noise floor.īut, with many recordings, the actual noise floor of the recording is usually the limiting factor. That might require 15+ dB of gain be applied. And say one of the tracks is very soft and you wanted to normalize or "volume level" just that one soft track to put it on your iPod. I would add, however, if you're going to be doing any processing of the audio (versus simply sending the original bit stream to the DAC for listening), then 24 bit can have an audible advantage in certain circumstances.įor example if you have say two versions of a classical recording with a wide dynamic range-one in 16 bit and the other in 24 bit. I largely agree with the answers posted above. When you're TRACKING audio, looking ahead to hours of digital zooming, mangling, effecting, cutting, pasting, etc., then it's a different story.Īs far as the foobar thing goes, I'm afraid I have no idea. The two other things to consider, in my opinion, are 1) could one ever hear this error at normal listening levels and 2) might the source material ALREADY have enough noise or randomness that this noise is already going to be masked or obliterated by more pronounced noise from tape hiss, microphone preamps, etc.? I think those two considerations pretty much eliminate any possible advantage of LISTENING to audio at 24-bits. To use a horrible analogy, if you smell brownies once a month, the smell will be stronger than after you get used to living in a brownie factory. Without dither, this noise will be somewhat irregular, so dithering is introduced to "blur" the error and make it theoretically less audible. So yes, all you're doing is adding noise.
![wavelab 6 not enough space for dithering wavelab 6 not enough space for dithering](https://s1.manualzz.com/store/data/004655603_1-f651457b1d865f9cbce32c089fd8413e-360x466.png)
You can think of the resulting 16-bit signal as a sum of the original (24-bit) signal and a small signal representing the small bits of error from whenever the original signal had to round up or round down from a 24-bit value to a 16-bit value.
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The effect of reducing the bit-depth (forget dithering completely for a second) will, all other things held equal, introduce some noise as a product of the quantization process.