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AudioGames.net Forum → Off-topic room → Does 24 bit audio have any real difference from 16 in turms of noise?
So I have a zoom h 2n, and on it, I have been recording in 24 bit wav for quite some time. Right now, I'm not worried about space, I have more than enough, just asking, can any one here hear a real difference?
The question if you want to use 16 bit or 24 bit usually doesn't influence the pure sound human can hear, but the quality of the resulting sound after processing it in e.g. a DAW. Pitch/speed control is the most obvious example for this. The higher the bit- and samplerate of a sound, the less artifacts can be noticed after changing the pitch or speed of a sound. Thus, most up-to-date sound libraries are sold at 192 khz / 24 bits nowadays, to allow the best possible quality when postprocessing the sounds recorded/produced. If it comes to plain listening, I don't think anyone can seriously notice any difference.
Best Regards.
Hijacker
For a recording device, the more important question is whether the noise floor of the preamps is significantly higher than the noise floor imposed by the bit depth. If so, it won't make much of a difference. For 16 bit you have a noise floor of around -87 dB if I remember correctly. For 24 bit it is significantly lower. But in plain terms, if you want to be safe you should always record in 24 bit. The damage introduced to the signal when using a lower bit depth can never be reversed, but you can always scale down to 16 bit later if your source audio is at a higher bit depth to begin with.
Kind regards,
Philip Bennefall
To add to 3rd post, every bit equals to about 6dB of volume. So, 16 bit would be a total of 96dB full volume, which is enough in most cases, but can be a problem for classical music. A symphonic orchestra can sometimes go up to 110dB, quite near our upper limit. All in all, record at 24bit, edit it the way you want, export/render at 16 bit. Best practice, from my own experience.
yup, plus! things tend to distort less when clipping at 24 than at 16. It takes up more space though, but its definitely worth it.
Is 32bit ever the best in any situations?
Reaper uses 64 bit FP, which is the best of the best. Since it's floating point, it's quite rare that it distorts. I edit everything at 64 FPS and export at 24
yeah but it ain't gonna come out as 64 bit floating point when you render, so like, yeah, no clipping / no distorting is a bit of a sticking point because people just getting into audio work might be wondering why it sounds OK in Reaper, but not in the rendered file.
oh this discussion has come up time and time again and especially if you look at reaper forums. Reaper does use 64 bit fp for internal processing, which is the better of all because it does give you room for many things, including dynamics. You would not render to 64 bit fp firstly because files of that size aren't really supported by absolutely any players, secondly because of the unnecessary redundancy of information for most common every day tasks, and thirdly because these kinds of things are reserved for audio that is going, for instance, on a film project or whatever else which is likely to process it too much afterwards.
No multi billion dollar console, recorder or interface out there as of this very moment comes even close to 32 bit recording capability, so it really will not make much sense to record into a language that is not even supported by your preamps and converters, even though some protools fanboys somewhat stupidly insist that you ought to record at their place because oh look the latest version exports at 32 bits!
With 16 bit we already have lots and I mean lots, of room for clipping to occur which it in any ideal circumstance really never should because you are a good engineer/audio person and set your levels accordingly and accurately to get the best of everything. Volume wars is a different story, but this can potentially get there.
ProTools is just overrated. There are no big differences between Pt, Logic, Reaper and Samplitude. Of course, if you do right volume control and good dynamic balance in a 64 bit FP recording in reaper, it will come out very good in 24 bit as well. Just don't go over 0dB.
AudioGames.net Forum → Off-topic room → Does 24 bit audio have any real difference from 16 in turms of noise?
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