24bit vs 16bit, the myth exploded! - Page 8

No, but I want to be able to hear that moquito sneeze, dammit.

You hear it. You get malaria. Bill Gates will be happy to help. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,488348,00.html

Good thing I put in the caveat that I could be completely wrong

I'm not certain this is true. If you prove a theory mathematically, all you've done is proven the mathematical validity of that theory. You could come up with a legitimate mathematical proof for a theory that is imperfect. There are many mathematical proofs for string theory, but all of those proofs are contingent upon the underlying physical understanding of the theory being correct. The math for the theory may be correct, but that doesn't mean it's a perfect representation of nature.

[Note: I didn't see mape00's response, otherwise I wouldn't have responded. I did not intend to belabor the point]

Sampling rate does not eliminate highs it simply causes aliasing and misrepresentation of them. It is typical for encodes to apply a lowpass that eliminates the frequencies - and many will do this based on a combination of bit depth and sampling frequency. Typical sampling rates for 8 bit are 22.05khz, and not 44.1khz. PCM will accept 44.1 khz for 8bit audio, but it is hardly ever used: see game boys, the NES and the good old telephone. Sure, your numbers are correct in theory, but they are not default. As for your precious 16bit, a lot of studios are now recording in 24bit and then converting 16bit for CD media (oh no!).
You do know amplitude quantisation occurs in all digital media where each waveform is not represented as a complete picture, but merely as a snapshot, right? The resolution in 24bit audio is much higher and I am pretty sure you can get a much smoother representation of dynamic (note: dynamic, not contour) whereas noise will be added to lower bitdepths to snap each sample to the supported resolution. It's not like 24bit audio is just adding more volume onto the audio. There is the capacity to use a larger number of different amplitudes per sample! There are more ticks to snap to in a 24bit digital recording and it will be a more accurate representation of the sound if done correctly. You can have a "louder" signal from 24bit audio which can then be scaled down (a lovely thing called the volume knob), to a level that is not disimilar to the same song in a 16bit audio stream. However the bits will _not_ be the same. There will be greater dynamic accuracy in the 24bit stream because you can use the extra room up the top and then audibly reduce the distance between each quantisation with both encode and the volume knob...
As for the additional dynamic range of 24bit audio being undesirable, I think you are pressing it just a little to far with this statement. Welcome to the sound engineer. Many sound engineers are not 12 yearold kids who love dynamic range and are going to have passages that are terribly soft with drum hits that are amazingly loud. Most engineers will apply a brickwall (that is a compression filter with a small attack and release time) and then increase the volume of the track. My personal favourites will just record and slap it on tape. I doubt 24 bit audio will help us with regards to the loudness war. However, with regards to recording one shout and then putting it on media "as is" I think 24bit resolution is definitely worthwhile. Why would I want my drums to have less impact than they were intended to by the artists? Musicians do have ears.
Thread is becoming a bit monotonous and boring... If you are afraid of change, or cant afford or get high resolution gear/audio at the moment dont worry about it, the price will come down, and if things pan out the way they have for the last while with digital media, 24bit will come to the fore later on in this life. 16 bit audio is not perfect and as such it does not do justice to music, albeit it performs very well. Digital storage mediums will _never_ do audio true justice because of the quantisation that occurs. Even then one could argue that the warm hum you get from analog reproduction is not doing it justice either (although i particularly like it). 24bit audio has the capacity to store orchestra hits or heaven forbid cannon blasts (from a particular epic) far more realisticly because of the dynamic range without the overall sound becoming too loud.

We are also seeing a generation with large amounts of hearing loss due to pressing their volume switches upwards because thats what compressed music wants you to do. Have you ever noticed that you often turn down the volume on drums with good 'crack' to them? Perhaps, if the mainstream industry plays it fairly perhaps we may be able to avoid a generation of deaf people.

Whether or not you or I can personally hear a difference at this point in time, the fact of the matter is there is a difference between 16 and 24 bit audio and frankly you are starting to smell a bit like a troll. Then again, maybe everything I learned in college is false and the big bad internet has one-upped me again.
(sorry for bad english)
**the bit-depth war is getting to me just as much as the loudness war. Let better technology come all it wants. It's not going to affect you at all.

uh guy, he IS a sound engineer.

uh, so was I. If you were to have a large amount of loudness followed by a very quiet section, with enough clarity in your equipment (which is always getting better) you may be able to pick up on the noise floor quite easily, especially as the sound approaches -80dBFS.
What the OP wants you to believe is "great sound" is actually just a dither doing its job and there is nothing particularly special about that at all.
**what he is saying is nothing particularly new or exciting. This has been a hot topic over at HAF for a long time, partciularly the cannon in teldecs 1812 overture which live exceeds the dynamic range by enough that can be considered acceptible in 16bit audio (in my opinion), where noise may become audible.
**the main problem with with 24bit playback atm is that the SNR of most equipment in use at the moment is only slightly better than pure 16bit. You can stretch this through simple thermodynamics (that is, cooling the equipment such as treating it cryogenically) and get a much better noise resolution but as far as approaching 24bit at this point in time i think using 24bit for playback is a overreaching a bit. It's sort of like how 64bit operating systems came out too early for 90% of users to have more than 3gb of ram without knowing how to use it in a 32bit OS. In the studio 24bit is definitely the way to go at the moment for the dynamic range, although the noise floor you hear is more likely to come from the equipment than the signal.
**if the OP still disagrees, perhaps he'd like to find and ABX an unshaped and undithered test tone... oh well, i'm done with this before it develops into a flame war...
to save him time he could take it two ways from here
a. disk space to which i have no response but get bigger storage and b. he could argue whether or not differences are audible outside of test tones (i.e. in music). In which case there is no definite answer at the moment. "no" would be the current answer, but it has not really been tested whether it is possible by a large number of people. There are those out there that believe emotional response is more real from higher resolution/sample rates due to the affect of high frequencies on the brain etc.

Did you read the first post in this thread?

I did, but my english is poor (and so is my memory).
He makes some valid points however I feel that he is misguided. There is a difference between 16 bit and 24bit audio. Whether current hardware can present it well enough and whether our ears can "get it" well enough is a completely different story.
There was no myth exploded. Everyone knows that it's much easier to ABX 8bit vs 16 bit (or even 12 bit) than it is to abx 16 vs 24. Some of his arguments like that there is "no difference other than dynamic range" are borderline moronic when there clearly are.
exiting stage left
edit: uh no, I'd appreciate if the personal attacks were kept to a minimum.
A compression filter with 1 sample attack and release time does exactly the same thing as a limiter... You dont require a lower bit depth to do anything when you compress something. You can encode anything however the hell you want.
As for the cannon being fired? Yes, I will take the real volume. Exposure time for 120 db is 8.5 minutes if i recall correctly and it is halved for a 5 db increase. A cannonblast amongst a loud orchestra will not cause permenant ear damage.
"Ticks are the basic timing units derived from the BPM (PPQN) of your sequencer and have nothing to do with sampling rates"
I was using tick as an example of where the quantisation occurs (that is vertically on the typical representation of a waveform), not of anything else. This is at best an english error and I would appreciate you to not make fun of my english as it is not my native language.
"Oh please! You can't have "aliasing and misrepresentation" of the recorded waveform otherwise it's going to be a recording full of complete rubbish and no one would be using digital audio. This is why all ADCs have an anti-alias filter, it's not optional, it is an absolute requirement and it's not based on bit depth but purely the Nyquist Point, IE. roughly half the sampling frequency. What college did you go to that taught you the rubbish you are spouting?"
I was talking about in the DAC process, not the ADC. Again i feel like you are making fun of my english... sigh
When you tell me that a digital storage results in a perfect reproduction of the complete picture, you are telling lies. The picture you are hearing is not the original picture. Close, but not quite. Have a nice day, I don't feel like partaking in a flame war. HAF Go here and have a nice day... i'm sure you'll learn a lot.

Dude, this is weak. First you accuse him of being a troll- which was both unfounded and uncalled for, and then you say that he's starting a flame war? You threw the first stone. You accused him of not knowing what he was talking about, when the problem was that you couldn't be bothered to read the whole thread. He's been a member for over a year, and you've been a member for less than a month- and yet despite the fact that you started with unnecessary rhetoric, you accuse him of being a troll?

I think you are a troll.

And stop trying to hide behind your poor English skills. You're out and out attacking people, and then hiding behind your poor English writing skills? That's way weak. Regardless of what your level of English proficiency, we are forced to understand what you mean as a function of what you write. Do you really expect everyone to read your posts and then spend a lot of time analyzing what you meant versus what you wrote? He did not intentionally misinterpret you, that much is clear.

Weak!

What does join date have to do with anything? (other than nothing).
I am also aware that I said something about his opinion first, because I was pretty disgusted by how blatantly he was trying to force his opinion (not to mention itd be amazing if he could preempt my post) on people on an undoubtedly grey area (at this point in time). Since then the thread has degraded into tit-for-tat pseudo-flaming which is why I am now ejecting myself. I have said what I wanted to said and am going to leave it at that.
Please keep your personal attacks away from me.

You come in here, spew seven shades of ******** and now you're leaving the thread?

Thanks so much for your input. I'm sorry the language barrier has it made so difficult for you to have a rational debate.


EK