Garthrr wrote:

This is the first time I have heard this. Now this makes more sense to me.

I thought it was about the 4th or 5th time I said it in these threads
over the past 2 days, and I thought I was repeating myself. But I'm
glad to hear it's starting to gel.

I still dont understand why the info that falls between the 16 bits
would necessarily be low level information but I dont doubt that its
true.

Because the space between those bits is very tiny. Remember, we're not
talking about the whole 24-bit sample or the whole 16-bit sample.
We're talking about the DIFFERENCE between those two.

Think about a 16-bit sample as simply a 24-bit sample with 8 zeroes on
the end. So the difference between 24-bit audio and 24-bit audio
truncated to 16 bits is simply those last 8 bits dancing around. It
doesn't matter what the first 16 bits are doing because they're doing
it the same in both cases. We're only discussing what's in one sample
that's NOT in the other. Now, those last 8 bits can dance around as
rambunctiously as they like, but they'll never represent a DEVIATION
from the 16-bit sample of more than -96dBFS.

Suppose you have an input signal whose voltage at some arbitrary point
in time is 3.26534263219541623 volts. Now, off the top of my head I
estimate that the best approximation of this voltage you can represent
with 24 bits is maybe 3.2653426 volts. And 16 bits would round it off
to around 3.26534. So what's going on in the 24-bit audio that's
missing from the 16-bit audio? A signal in the neighborhood of 2.6
microvolts. Which is pretty dang low-level if you ask me. Even though
the signal we're listening to is up in the ballpark of full scale, the
"missing detail" we're talking about is down below -96dBFS.


Next question?

ulysses