24 bit 48k Whats the point?

K

KaosTheory

New member
24bit at 48K sounds great until you want to put it on an audio cd. The final product is more than a little shy of some high frequencies and sounds muddy compared to its original 24bit format. Why would you want to record at that bit depth when it sounds like crap after the down conversion?

Kaos
 
Sounds like your sample rate converter suck the big one. I try not to work with 48KHz files at all if I don't have to so that I dont' have to to sample rate convert.

Try it out with just recording at 44.1KHz SR. Stay with 24 bit, and make sure you use the best dithering scheme you can. If you have the Wave's L1 plugin, that has a pretty decent dithering scheme, and you should apply it as the very last thing you do with your stereo .wav file. This will help retain the maximum depth you can currently get on CD.

Good luck.

Ed

P.S. There are a variety of reasons you should stay at 24 bits until the very end, only one of which I will list right now. Your DSP will sound MUCH better with 24 bit files.
 
What Ed said. You really do want the greater bit depth in order to maximize resolution and headroom all the way through your signal processing chain. Then, you dither down as the last step before burning.

The quality advantage you get from 24bit is *much* greater than the quality advantage you get form the 48kHz sampling rate, given modern oversampling converters. However, it's all moot if you have a bad dither algorithm (or worse yet, if your software simply truncates down to 16 bits without dithering at all).

Absolutely do try 24/44.1, us a good dither algorithm, and see how you like the results. Straight dither is easier to do than sample rate conversion, and not all software packages get either one right...
 
Dither

I am using Dave Brown's stuff for now. It does have settings for dither type 1 and type 2 but I don't know what the difference is.

Ok, so I have my 24bit mixdown. You are saying that I should render that down to 16 bits and have the Mastering Limiter set to dither? By the way, I am using Vegas for the down conversion. What other programs can do a nice job of down conversion.

Thanks for the tip on the 48k sample rate thing. From now on its 24/44.

Kaos
 
Once you have applied dithering at 16 bit, you can just do a "Save As", or "Save Convert" or whatever your application offers for saving as a 16 bit file. In Wavelab, you use Save Convert and can pick some different options.

The Waves L1 Ultramaximizer has a decent dithering thing on it, and if you have the Waves NNP, I beleive they all include the ADR dithering with it as a DirectX plugin. You would run it last in the chain.

Ed
 
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