24 vs 16

  • Thread starter Thread starter johnbob
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You're right about the scientist/engineer part.

My statement would only refer to mathemeticians. Damned "applied" geeks and their decimal points...
 
So are you guys saying that if recording for cd's it's best to use 44.1/24 than 48/24 because of the SRC? Sorry for the dumb question here but what if you are just creating mp3's?
 
NYMorningstar said:
So are you guys saying that if recording for cd's it's best to use 44.1/24 than 48/24 because of the SRC?
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That's what I'm saying.
NYMorningstar said:
Sorry for the dumb question here but what if you are just creating mp3's?
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It doesn't matter for the mp3's, but I would assume, someday you will want to listen to them in a non-destructive format. I archive all of my stuff at 44.1/24.
 
Farview said:
That's what I'm saying. It doesn't matter for the mp3's, but I would assume, someday you will want to listen to them in a non-destructive format. I archive all of my stuff at 44.1/24.
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If you're going to compress audio, Monkey or Flac is probably the best, but gets nowhere near the compression of mp3s (50:1). For lossy compression, I generally use the ogg vorbis format. It supports multi-channel, and either 16 or 24 bit as well (maybe even 32bit as well). At high bitrates (300+k/bs) the sound is transparent, at least to my ears, plus ogg seems to be universally compatible these days.

Also, one comparison I'm surprised has not been made between 16/24 bit is the raw amount of the level differences. With 16 bit, you have precisely 65536 levels, with 24 bit, you somewhere around 16,777,216 volume levels. With 32 bit, you would have 4,294,967,296 (4 billion) possible levels. Talk about headroom!!
 
But there aren't 32 bit converters. And the floating point math gives you even more (somewhere around 1500db of dynamic range), but it's all virtual. In the earths atmosphere, you only have 194db of possible dynamic range. (theoretically. Nothing is that loud or absolutely quiet) 32 bit fixed would get you 192db of dynamic range, but almost 100db of it would be below the noise floor of most recording equipment.
 
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