Comment by davesims
14 years ago
That's cute. Obviously you've never recorded a rock band while riding the pre to compensate for 16bit's terrible noise floor and horribly limited headroom. You've never had the joy of ruining a perfectly good take because of that wonderful sound it makes when the volume spikes into digital distortion despite compressing the wazoo out of the input source. Glorious sound, digital distortion. Run a dentist drill through an old Speak & Spell and you'd just about have it.
You've never rented an expensive tube EQ during a mix to cover up 16bit's grating harshness from 10k to 15k. Or tried like mad to make the bass drum sound like a freaking bass drum and not a pie pan slamming against the back of a plastic trash can. And yes, we had good mics and pres, all standard studio stuff. Decent, not brilliant, converters, but it was the 16bit that was the problem. Getting those 20bit XTs for the first time was like walking into the Promised Land.
Sure, there's lots of marketing ploys out there, lots of snake oil. Moving up from 16 bit was not one of them.
Did you read the original article at all?
> Professionals use 24 bit samples in recording and production [11] for headroom, noise floor, and convenience reasons.
...snip...
> Modern work flows may involve literally thousands of effects and operations. The quantization noise and noise floor of a 16 bit sample may be undetectable during playback, but multiplying that noise by a few thousand times eventually becomes noticeable. 24 bits keeps the accumulated noise at a very low level. Once the music is ready to distribute, there's no reason to keep more than 16 bits.
The original article does say that yes, during recording and production, 24 bit audio gives you a lot more room to play with. That doesn't mean that you can hear the difference between 16 and 24 bits for the final recording; just that 24 bits give you more room to keep out of trouble during production.
Did you read the comment thread at all? I wasn't responding to the article, I was responding to a comment:
...snip...
>Same goes for 16/24 bit, however, the difference between 16 and 24 bit is actually audible
No, the difference is not audible at all.
...snip...
It looks like you are jumping in without actually having read the article in question. That's ok, but you are wasting space building a straw man proceeding to vigorously demolish him.
The original article explicitly mentions how 24bit is useful for recording.
Speaking of jumping in without reading...I wasn't responding to the article. I was responding to the commenter that said you couldn't tell the difference between 16 and 24 bit.
And you cannot tell the difference. The reason to record using 24 bits is so you don't have to be as precise centering the recording level. If that level is centered then you can capture fine with 16 bits (by the way that is also explained in the article).