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Justin Ulysses Morse wrote:
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|While it's true that the additional bits tack your extended resolution
|onto "the bottom" of the dynamic range, it clearly increases the
|resolution at all levels. You can have a -100dB component to a -1dB
|signal, and you still want to hear it.

Is the ear even capable of hearing the -100 component against the much
louder -1? I thought masking pervented this.

Phil

Masking, it is frequency-dependent. However, this leads to thinking about
the fact that the human ear actually compresses dynamics at higher sound
pressures. My understanding is that we have roughly 80dB's worth of dynamic
range at a time, which we then move according to the sound pressure levels
of the sound sources.
For example, if you'd be listening something at 110dB SPL for 5 minutes,
after that you couldn't hear the same sound with 2dB SPL for a while. It
works the other way round too: If you're listening something at 5dB spl for
a while, and then suddenly the same sound source produces a 120dB spl sound,
your ear would compress it lower(by stretching the eardrum, moving the
hammer away from it etc) in order to protect your hearing mechanism. This,
however isn't true with very short peaks because your protection mechanism
takes some time to wake up.