Thank you for your detailed and well written response.
I am almost afraid to keep nagging about this but I was not thinking about any sort of compatibility issues. I was thinking a 24bit pedal might sound better if recorded and monitored in 24bit and worse if recorded and monitored in 16bit. I have never heard the sound of my pedals in anything other than 16bit monitoring and/or recording. When you say "...other than you'll possibly get a better recording of it" it seems to me that you're saying it would sound better..
Summarized question: Does a 24bit pedal usually sound better on a 24bit recording than it would on a 16 bit recording?
I am not asking whether or not a 24 bit pedal actually produces better sound than 16 bit pedals.
Sorry about this.
you don't have to apologize first. It's a valid question.
What I meant was that recording in 24bits
might get a better recording of the 16bit pedal ..... because EVERYTHING
might sound better when recorded at 24bits. NOT because the 16bit pedal now sounds bad because it's being recorded in 24bit.
Note that I said
might first off. There's some disagreement over whether 24bits always sounds noticably better than 16bits in all situations. Some feel the headroom issue is the main thing and music with limited dynamic range may or may not really benefit from the extra bits.
But if we make the stipulation that the 24bit rig we're talking about
does sound better than the previous 16bit recorder, ALL that means is it might capture any sound better.
Although the possibility exists that a 24bit pedal might be quieter or sound better than a 16bit pedal, what matters is the reality. DOES it sound better?
Let's look at it the other way. Let's say you get a 24bit pedal instead of a 16bit and let's say that it sounds bad ..... or at least not nearly as good as the 16bit (absolutely possible) ..... would you use the 24bit anyway?
Of course not ...... you're trying to craft a guitar sound here.
24bits is theoretically better ...... should be quieter and better processing going on. But I can guaruntee you that there are plenty of 24bit pedals that are noisier than other 16bit pedals and sound worse ..... and vice versa too.
In a pedal especially, it's the implementation that counts so you need to try some and pick one you like the sound of. And you obviously want to make sure they're not noisy since you're going direct.
For some things, as I said, I think you wanna go with 24bits but for pedals you should quit thinking about that and simply make sure you get stuff that
sounds good.
Getting a good guitar sound direct is hard enough. You don't want to use bad sounding stuff simply because theoretically it
ought to sound better.
