"Garthrr" wrote in message

In article , Justin
Ulysses Morse writes:

Okay, so let's think about the bit depth again. Suppose you have a
loud-ass signal represented by 16 bits. If you move to 24 bits, you
are now able to "more accurately" represent that loud-ass signal
because you can represent an actual signal that falls in-between the
bits in the 16-bit system. But this additional information is
NOTHING more than low-level information.

This is the first time I have heard this. Now this makes more sense
to me. 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. Perhaps someone could explain. Thanks Ulysses, thats a step
forward in my understanding.

The information that falls between the pairs of 16 bit values is obviously
very small, so I guess its fair to call it "low level information".

Imagine two 16 bit signals. One is a 1 KHz sine wave and one is a 10 KHz
sine wave. Both are integers that vary between 0 and 65535. Now, let's take
both sine waves and convert them to 24 bit numbers by adding trailing zeros.
They are now both numbers that vary between 0 and 16,777,215. Actually,
since the numbers were created by adding 8 zeroes to the end, no number goes
above 16,776,960. Both sets of numbers are a bit unusual, in that every
number ends with 8 zeroes.

Let's take the 10 KHz sine wave and divide it by 65536. It becomes very
low-level signal. It becomes a number that varies between 0 and 255.

Now, lets add the 10 KHz sine wave to the 1 KHz sine wave. Finally, we have
a set of numbers that don't all end in 8 zeroes!

The samples whose last 8 bits aren't zero represent the 10 KHz low level
signal, don't they? So the low level detail is, in a manner of speaking, in
the samples that are "in between".

If we want to separate the 1 KHz and 10 KHz signals, we have two possible
strategies:

(1) Do frequency domain filtering

(2) Take the top 16 bits of every sample which will give us back the
original 1 KHz sine wave, and take the bottom 8 bits every sample which will
give us back an 8 bit 10 KHz sine wave.