"Jay - atldigi" wrote in message
...
In article ,
(Garthrr) wrote:


Actually I was under the impresion that Jay was on the other side of the
fence--that he was saying that 24 bit was really no better than 16 bit
for any sort of real world audio.

Absolutely not. I know there's a lot of posting going on, and I've
written a lot in this thread, but I know I've stated several times that
the above is not what I'm saying. Instead of adding even more
confustion, please try to go back and read my posts again. Hopefully in
retrospect they'll make more sense.

Thanks,

Well, you have to think in terms of the statement "real world audio", then
it's possible that 24 isn't better than 16 if real world audio recording is
accomplished in a room where quiet is represented by about -55 dB of room
noise, which would be a lot of live situations (or worse) and in a lot of
home/project studios where thousands haven't been spent in acoustic taming.
At that point, I believe there's a point where, on mic'd instruments,
masking starts taking place if one is playing that quietly, and it's
questionable whether having 24 bit converters actually does anything for
you. In your real world audio, Jay, as a mastering engineer, you obviously
should work at the highest resolution one can give you, hopefully allowing
enough real world audio headroom to do your job without having to step on
it. In 16 bit products it was normal to see -.1 dBFS levels with absolutely
no room for a mastering engineer to do anything but bring it down in order
to bring it back up. 24 bits doesn't even stop this stupid waste of
bandwidth, but at least it allows some level of having real headroom over
noise than 16 bits did. Does that matter on the above scenario when one is
working in a noisy room? Probably not. Does it matter if the 24 bit's
analog front end sucks and the 16 bit's analog front end doesn't? Probably.

I guess the real world problem is that one cannot define "real world audio"
that sticks for everyone. Personally I'd start at the bottom and say if the
room is live and going to be noisy with A/C turning on and off, people
shuffling their feet or programs or coughing, then 24 bit isn't a necessity
in that "real world audio" environment. Somewhat akin to the idea of having
EQ boosted in the HF range on a bass track where there's no content. Stupid
waste of space. Or dollars.

--


Roger W. Norman
SirMusic Studio
Purchase your copy of the Fifth of RAP CD set at www.recaudiopro.net.
See how far $20 really goes.