24/96 i don't understand, help!

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Riff_hunter

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I bought the audiophile 2496 to replace my old crappy soundblaster. I also bought it because of all the rave of 24/96.
Now I just want to understand something. Do the sounds that come from my synth AUTOMATICALLY get converted to 24/96 as soon as they pass trough the soundcard or what? I mean, I record my stuff with Soundforge and cool edit pro and the options I get from these 2 softwares are not 24 bit. It's either 16 or 32 (floating).
 
Your software needs to be instructed to record at 24/96.
Im not sure about cool edit but im quite sure SF will.
And if your gear does not output at 24 bit its not doing much good to record at 24 bit, but will perhaps give you noticable improvement but it will be hard to hear it. Now using 96kHz will give you some more headroom for effects and such but most folks record at the standard 44.1 kHz
It is however a descent card for the money. Far better than an SB
 
aha! yes, I don't think my synth's output is 24 bit and the 4.5 soundfore I got does not have option to 24 bit. Maybe I have to tweak it more, but the soundcard is so much better than sb. When i recorded it from output of synth to input of soundcard, the hiss was almost not there. It is an amazing soundcard so far. And to tell you the truth, the reason I got it was to eliminate hiss and it has done that!:)
 
Good deal !
Yeah, the AP is capable of 24 bit but the software has to support it as well. Look into SF 6.0, it may do 24 bit. You can get the upgrade cheaper than buying it outright if you have your serial #.
I use SF 6.0 but only as an editor and I know it will import 24 bit files but I dont use it to record so not sure what its record options are.
 
i'm not sure why 24 bit isn't listed, but you could always just use 32 bit. the only disagvantage is that it takes a bit more processing power and RAM and HD space, but not much more. 32 bit recording basically just takes your soundcard's 24 bit input and puts it into a 32 bit file. the advantage of 32 bit is that it's nearly impossible to clip in mixing.
 
bleyrad said:
the advantage of 32 bit is that it's nearly impossible to clip in mixing.
Click to expand...
Say What?????????

Not true at all... there is really no such thing as 32-bit recording... it's really 32-bit s/w-specific internal word size used for digital processing precision - meaning *potentially* better precision in doing bit arithmetic -- but as far as the actual recording sample goes, it's a 24-bit word size at best.
 
Blue Bear, I did state that 32-bit is only taken from the 24-bit input of the soundcard. I was implying that, as a result, the overall quality would be pretty much the same.

However, I disagree with you on the advantages of floating-point wordlengths. From Steinberg Support :

"So to sum up a 32 bit floating point representation for audio can define very small signals, and is practically OVERLOAD proof."

I never said it will stop clipping within the soundcard, either when tracking or or playing back the final summed signal, but it DOES stop clipping within the software while mixing.

The key here, of course, is not the 8-bit difference, but rather the fact that 32-bit commonly comes in FLOATING POINT form, while 24-bit comes in INTEGER form.
 
be careful with * NUMBER MAGIC *

Sonusman has detailed number magic many times, but you can do some logic exercises and think about the consequences of number magic
 
32 bit files do offer a large increase in headroom, and make it much harder to overload the mix buss or EQ's. Within reason, they make it possible to not worry about going over 0db until the last stage.
At least equally advantageous is the increased accuracy in the FP calculations that go on in digital mixing. A lot of what makes one software sound better than another is the accuracy of the math, and 32 bit greatly diminishes the rounding errors associated with lesser bit depths.
Regards, RD
 
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