Does it give you a better compressed fil
when you record in 24 but you get better resolution but in order to distribute it (cd wave or mp3) you need to mix it down to a 16 bit formatt, right? (Am I phrasing the question right?)
Is there any advantage to 24 bit recording if you are distributing to cd or ipod users?
Yes. Use 24 bit if you have it and can afford the hard drive space.
OK - but what happens when I want to burn a cd or send a mpg? Aren’t both those mediums 16 bit?
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but dont use a vacum cleaner
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Wooo Hoooo 
| Quote (barry @ Feb. 25 2005,17:13) |
| OK - but what happens when I want to burn a cd or send a mpg? Aren't both those mediums 16 bit? |
This is all math stuff. I wrote a long post way back when explaining it and the baord seems to die every 9 motnhs, so here is it abreviated. You need to think of this stuff like interest on an investment. 8% on $10 vs 8.5% interest on $10 is not that big of a difference, but on a billion dollars, that will add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars lost if you round off 8.5% to 8%. The same is true with digital audio. You are cramming all this stuff through a zillion effects, EQ, etc and the more decimal places you have, the more accurate your final product will be. 24 bit adds many more decimal places than 16 bit. Don't cheat yourself out of that extra accuracy. THink about it. At 44.1khz, you have 44,100 samples per SECOND! Multiply that times 8 tracks and 3 minutes, that's over 63 million samples. Smash those through a few effects, you are up to many millions of mathmatical calculations in no time.
Great explaination Bubbagump! Finally make since to me.
Thanks
I think I understand it better. I’ll do a little studying on my own. When I go 16 bit in the mixdown(from 24) how much am I going to lose? My fear is that I record in 24 and it all sounds great(at least to me) and then I drop down to 16 and it sounds cheap. Sort of like when you record in a studio and your hearing your stuff on ultra high quality speakers so you think its profesional then you play the disk at home and it sounds chincy. Is this a reasonable fear?
Thaks again for the response.
You are thinking way to hard on this. Separate the math from the sound. Many many pro mixes you hear on the radio any more are done in 24 bit and then at the end converted to 16 bit for mass distribution. You won’t lose very much in the way of dynamics. (This is what bit depth is a measurement of, the amount of available dynamic on a track.) Just please trust me when I say, keep it as accurate as you can until the end. It is tough to articulate this in writing. Think of graphics. If you start with medium resolution and then want to blow it up and after the fact shringk the graphic, it gets choppy. If you stay at high resolution the whole way through, the end result will be much better. Think about the interest analogy I presented above and let’s do some math here…
16 bit vs 24 bit essentially is how many decimal places we have to play with. The further out you can take a decimal, the more accurate the measurement. SO lets take a billion dollar investment. If I were a bank, I could offer you an interest rate of 8.5% or 8.5487% per year. What difference does that make over a year? At 8.5% you would make $85 million. At 8.5487%, a more accurate measurement of the true interest, you would make $85,487,000. I should could use an extra $487,000.
Now, carrying the math out, you may have fractions of a penny here and there that can’t be distributed. How do I give you 1/8 of a cent? I can’t. But I can give you the extra $487k. That is essentailly what happens at the very end of the process when you go from 24 or 32 bit to 16 bit. You may lose a few pennies here and there, but you still get to keep your extra $400k that would have been lost otherwise had you started rounding early in the game. Make better sense now?
I like the picture analogy! If you do image editing you want the highest quality image RAW or bitmap, so it is the most accurate when you are working with it. When you put it online or send it to someone you want to save it as a jpg or something that takes up less space, the jpg looks almost as good and at a smaller size probably as good (since the eye can only discern a certain amount of resolution). It’s about granularity of control when you are working with the item.
Hopefully I didn’t totally mess up your analogy.
oops
The picture anallogy was good. And now I get the money in the bank example as well. I still need to do some studying but I trust that 24 bit is the right way to go. Now I just have to figure out this buzz I get when I crank it up to 24 bits(it’s not the organ sound that unregistered users get). If I don’t figure that one out I’ll start a new thread.
Thanks again.
You should consider what you are working with though. If you are recording a crappy/crappily played drumset in a crappy room with cheap mics through a behringer eurorack with cheap cables then i really don’t think upgrading to 24 bits is really going to help much.
Although, I am tempted to upgrade to 24-bits anyway.
| Quote (SteveM @ Mar. 08 2005,23:09) |
| You should consider what you are working with though. If you are recording a crappy/crappily played drumset in a crappy room with cheap mics through a behringer eurorack with cheap cables then i really don't think upgrading to 24 bits is really going to help much. Although, I am tempted to upgrade to 24-bits anyway. |
Of course GIGO is always in effect. Super pristine recordings of crap are still recordings of crap.
