whats your sample rate??

[mshilarious]

I wonder what audio would sound like when recorded through a 64-bit converter? And of course played back in 64-bit with the DA? Any different you think?

The laws of physics dictate that even an ideal 24 bit converter cannot use the theoretical 144dB of dynamic range. Due to thermal noise, you are looking at 22 to 23 bit dynamic range, max.

 

[Farview]

No, 64-bit audio does exist. It just isn't a format that any hardware natively produces. 64-bit floating-point audio is used as an intermediate format by audio applications for routing audio between plug-ins. Most apps just use 32-bit floating-point audio, but a few apps do use 64-bit.

Floating-point audio has one advantage over integer: it degrades more gracefully. Instead of being linear in nature, floating-point numbers are based on a fractional part and a power of ten. (Think scientific notation.) Thus, larger numbers have lower precision than smaller numbers (but still at least as much precision as 24-bit integer audio). The advantage of this is that when you do something that lowers the overall gain, the extra precision available for small values means lower quality loss. In effect, by using floating-point audio in your effects chain, you can put off gain staging until the end of the process.

That said, it is not currently practical to create a floating-point ADC or DAC. A few experimental floating-point ADC/DAC designs exist in various university science labs, but as far as I'm aware, all commercially-available ADC/DAC hardware operates natively in integer format (generally either 16-bit or 24-bit). It is not at all uncommon for drivers to convert this into a floating-point format for actual use, of course, but the converters are not providing floating-point data, and thus, the precision will never be greater than that of the underlying integer-based converters.

Right, but he isn't recording 64 bit audio, he's recording 24 bit audio with a bunch of zeros. It processes at 64 bit.

 

[Mindset]

You do realize that your converters are not 64 bit. They are just 24 bit.

yeah I know, I don't really run Sonar anyways, got it just to see what it does. I 100% of the time generally record at 24/48 or 44.1. If they made 64 bit converters, I'll have the first one in the world guaranteed.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

I wonder what audio would sound like when recorded through a 64-bit converter? And of course played back in 64-bit with the DA? Any different you think?

All 64-bit fixed point conversion would do under today's standards is open up your theoretical dynamic range from 144dB (32-bit) to 384dB. Quite unnecessary and quite useless as that range is way beyond the capability of the analog electronics and some three times the range of human hearing.

G.