Somebody told me to set my DAW to 16 bit for recording ..24 I thought?

[presto5]

I thought 24 bit was the best for recording..I use Reaper..

 

[Steenamaroo]

24 for recording/mixing, 16 for bouncing.

 

[somegeezer]

16 is what you use to put onto CDs. You can bounce it down to that, after you've recorded everything in 24.

 

[dgatwood]

I thought 24 bit was the best for recording..I use Reaper..

Whoever told you to record in 16-bit mode was wrong. That's a good way to kill your signal-to-noise ratio.

 

[somegeezer]

Whoever told you to record in 16-bit mode was wrong. That's a good way to kill your signal-to-noise ratio.

Not particularly wrong, but certainly it isn't best. One of the reasons, of course, being your S/N ratio point.

 

[guitarguy101]

I'd record it at the highest fidelity possible, then make lower-fi copies and see if theres a noticeable loss in quality.

 

[Bristol Posse]

well.......

even at 16 bit the digital noise floor is around -90dBFS. Your analog noise floor of your mics, guitar amps room noise etc is likely to still be way above that. if all you're doing is pure digital softsynths then fair enough.

having said all of that there's no real reason not to record in 24 bit unless your DAW is really bad at truncation of the word length and leaves a lot of artifacts when you go from 24 to 16 bits.

I'm betting in most normal home recording situations with less than ideal/noisy rooms and so on 99.9% of people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a 16 bit and a 24 bit recording

of course YMMV

 

[Murdersgalore]

I use 512bit float. It's a new thing. The CIA shared it with me in exchange for leading them to Bin Laden. The rest of you "civilians" will get to use it sometime in 2032. My ears are so awesome I can hear the difference between 24bit and 23.5bit on an ipod in traffic though.

 

[dgatwood]

even at 16 bit the digital noise floor is around -90dBFS. Your analog noise floor of your mics, guitar amps room noise etc is likely to still be way above that. if all you're doing is pure digital softsynths then fair enough.

If your levels are perfectly set, then yes, your digital noise floor is going to be lower than your analog noise floor. It also requires multiple concurrent miracles to get a recording in which the levels are perfectly set.

Because digital recording does not deal with clipping very well, you need to leave a fair amount of headroom on top to account for sudden loud bits. When you knock the recommended 24 dB of headroom off the top, your noise floor is now effectively at an appalling -66 dBFS, giving you barely the dynamic range of an analog cassette.

 

[Bristol Posse]

It also requires multiple concurrent miracles to get a recording in which the levels are perfectly set.

Or at least a good understanding of gain staging and calibration, which I guess in this era of plugging in and going without ever RTFM could be considered a miracle. Although since most of those who never read the manual actually record far too hot to get any real advantage of the added downward headroom in 24bit, 16 bit could be just what they need

 

[mixsit]

The 16 bit noise floor is still pretty good (low.
The experiment I did to check it out (long away and far ago DA30 mk1) it was tough to get down that low, gain it up to hear.. it was pretty nasty. Not some smooth mix of hiss or whatever.
Where you can get away with -30rms' in 24, maybe just keep the levels up healthy like.