24bit vs. 16 bit?

  • Thread starter Thread starter swollenrod
  • Start date Start date
Okay, forget posting it. But does anybody have two different-bit cards handy to compare? And yes, I've got a 24-bit card, and yes I convert it to 16-bit when I burn to CD. But as Dragon said months ago (and I'm quoting from memory and changing it some), what can converting from 24-bit to 16-bit actually accomplish in real audible terms?
Is this next summer's experiment?
 
Ok, you all should check out December's Home Recording Magazine. There's a semi-decent article about 24/96 vs traditional 16/44. Basically the article says that the major benefits of 24/96 are that you push your noise thresholds out of the human hearing range and that your effects will process much more accurately. Of course the drawbacks are pretty much limited to file size which also means your disk is going to be worked much harder.

The article finsishes by answering the question: "Should I upgrade my equipment to 24/96" with a big fat NO. It is not worth the money to replace existing hardware with 24/96 technology. HOWEVER! IT does say that if you're buying new equipment, then you might as well get 24/96 because it's not more expensive and will *eventually* become the standard.

What I personally have decided is that my equipment before the soundcard deserves more attention right now. No use getting a great card to capture a far-from-perfect sound.

Did you know that DVD "standard" is 24/192? Holy crap.

Anyway, check it out. It's obvious that the writer Pat Kirtley doesn't quite have a firm grasp on the technology...he misuses some terms here and there and his analogy isn't any better than those offered here :) Good article nontheless and a great magazine.

Slackmaster 2000
 
I thought DVD was 24/96 in stereo.... :)
Is that the 192 you mentioned????
Excuse my ignorance. I just have a regular old TV and my VCR died... :(
But 192? That's like these jokers selling dual 500MHz pentium board systems while saying the system runs at 1GHz.
 
Yep. 24/192 is the "standard" DVD audio spec. The more popular *proposed* spec is 24/96 like you said. They have some dumbass name for 24/96 like "super audio" or something. I guessing that means, "we're writing this standard from the standpoint that we want our audio to sound absolutely perfect....but since that's not really feasible right now, you can use our weaker specification which is still really 'super'."

Guess this might be a peek at where we're headed. As digital techology gets better, our music is going to get a lot closer to an analog sound minus the noise...which is a good thing. Except for the fact that I forsee many an upgrade in my future :)

Slackmaster 2000
 
Gee, I hate to drag this out any further, but about the 96khz vs. 48 khz: I have a hypothesis about that...

Human hearing only goes up to about 20khz or whatever, however, at that frequency, can it distinguish between a square wave and a sine wav? Considering those two things are about as different as a wave can get...

This is of interest, because 48khz recording could only record a sine wave at 24khz, because it only has two sample to store the shape of the wave. Because of the filters going out of a DA, the resulting waveform would be a sine wave. 96khz recording, on the other hand, would have four samples to record the shape in, and therefore would have more variety (i.e. it could record a sine wave or a rounded square wave at 24khz). Maybe somebody with a 96khz card could check this out for us?

Just an idea!!

William Underwood

P.S.

"Sapling..." I can't believe I said that, eh?
 
Cwillu: a 22khz sine wave recorded with a 44khz sample rate isn't a sine wave anymore. :) It is recorded as a square. That is the heart of the imperfections ... luckily the music we record isn't in the 22khz region (although I wish some kinds of music were) because we wouldn't hear it, and because hard-drive space would be too expensive for most musician folks. :)
Someone mentioned how in a studio, they prefer to keep the signal at 24bit for as long as possible. This makes perfect sense. Even if the final product will only be 16bit, the sound manipulation (be it editing, or effects) will turn out much better if it's done while still in 24bit. For example, if I take a picture with my loverly Kodak digital camera, and bring it into Photoshop, it's going to be huge at 100% zoom ... probably take up 4 monitors, if I had them. Obviously this is the best quality I'll ever be able to get out of my camera, but unfortunately it's unweildy ... it's a huge file, takes long to load, wouldn't look nice on a webpage ... so I have to shrink it to a more usable size. But I also wanted to twirl it!! (Yes folks, the most over-used effect in history). But should I perform my twirl before or after I shrink the picture? If I did it after, it would take much less processing time (there's a hint right there) but what am I twirling? I'm twirling a bastardization of my original picture. If I twirled before? It takes a lot more processing time (mm hmm) but I'm twirling the original picture, and incorporating everything, pixel by pixel, of what came out of my camera. There's no loss (Photoshop's inherant weaknesses aside). When I shrink this one, the result is a better representation, and it doesn't let Adobe's algorithms be as creative on my art (which is VERY good). Plus, although right now nobody can view my original picture (because 300k is sooooo damn big, uh huh) someday people everywhere will think "oh, 300k? That's peanuts..." and they'll be able to view it as it's supposed to be. If I had twirled it after, this wouldn't be possible. So, you see folks, I've .. lost interest.. sorry..
 
Just to put a little twist to this, I seem to remember reading some eons ago that the science of phsychoacustics (is that made up or what)discovered that high level harmonics, as in well beyond 20kh, interfere with those that ARE in the audible range, and therefore it's worth it to keep things flat and quite as far out as possible.
 
Dondello: as far as the waveform you see on the screen, the 22khz wave is recorded as a square wave. But (and this is a big but), when it is played back, the filters which govern all digital-analogue conversions filter out the frequencies higher than 22khz, which include the overtones which make a square wave a square wave. What's left, is a sine wave. To show this, get a square wave at 1khz, and apply a lowpass filter with a cut off slightly above 1khz. You might notice that the resulting wave looks much like a sine wave. :)

But that is beside the point, that being that the 96khz recording record the difference between two different waves, whereas 48khz recording would record them as the same wave.

William Underwood



[This message has been edited by cwillu (edited 11-28-1999).]
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top