16 bit vs 24 bit sampling , much better?

[harmonizer]

I am not an expert on this, but I believe the 16 bit vs 24 bit would make a bigger difference when you are recording a live performance, where the volume levels will be uncertain. Clipping during the capture is fatal, so you have to avoid that by leaving some headroom. As the recording engineer for a live performance, you really don't know just how hard will the drummer whack the snare or the cymbal, or how loud the guitarist will get when the high energy moment arrives. So you end up having much of the capture take place well below the level at which clipping begins. In this scenario, I believe the 24 bit vs 16 bit advantage is large. But if you are just sampling something in a controlled environment, where you can precisely control the volume of what is captured, and do it over if you get it wrong, I believe the advantage for 24 bit will be much less.

[PScooter63]

I'm curious what the toll on the hardware would be, in the case of your average Nord. To process all those extra bits at a higher rate besides, would they have to increase available memory, and processor speed, by orders of magnitude? Or in terms of processor power only, might they just reduce the available polyphony? Or a little of all the above?

Honest question, because I know just barely enough to be dangerous. (My gut tells me that nothing's free.)

[cgrafx]

Going from 48K to 96K would double the storage requirements and likely double the processing load as you would have to handle twice as many samples over the same amount of processing time.

Going from 16-bit to 24-bit would theoretically increase storage requirements by 50% and may or may not have any significant impact on the processing depending on the architecture of the hardware (which could be 16-bit, 24-bit, 32-bit, 48-bit, 64-bit). My guess is the DSP units currently in use are 32-bit processors, so their likely would be an increase in overhead handling the larger 24-bit sample data. A lot would depend on the specific buss sizes, internal register sizes and internal memory buss transfer methods. For example, can you move and load two 16-bit samples as a 32-bit pair. If so, than that operation would be faster than having to load two separate 24-bit samples (which can't be combined together as a 32-bit pair and would have to handled as two separate move operations).

[Wired]

I actually made a 24 bit Superpad , and , ya it’s better on 24 bit..., still almost the same low megabytes after generated

[friendben]

There will be more detail in a file with a higher sample frequency and deeper bit rate, but most people, nor their equipment can tell the difference. But if you are doing any processing to the file (compression, reverb, EQ, etc) you are losing detail, so if you want to end up with 16 bit, you generally need to start deeper (24 bit and 32 bit at 96Khz are popular choices). Any sample used as an oscillator source in a synth, will typically receive lots of processing, so start with the most detailed files your equipment will support. Then, down-sample to match the synth.

[WannitBBBad]

There will be more detail in a file with a higher sample frequency and deeper bit rate, but most people, nor their equipment can tell the difference. But if you are doing any processing to the file (compression, reverb, EQ, etc) you are losing detail, so if you want to end up with 16 bit, you generally need to start deeper (24 bit and 32 bit at 96Khz are popular choices). Any sample used as an oscillator source in a synth, will typically receive lots of processing, so start with the most detailed files your equipment will support. Then, down-sample to match the synth.

I agree - work with the highest sampling rate and bit size you have available - it will always provide a better starting point for any further processing and editing of the work.

[sweelinck]

There will be more detail in a file with a higher sample frequency and deeper bit rate, but most people, nor their equipment can tell the difference. But if you are doing any processing to the file (compression, reverb, EQ, etc) you are losing detail, so if you want to end up with 16 bit, you generally need to start deeper (24 bit and 32 bit at 96Khz are popular choices).

This is not correct. A higher sample rate than 44.1kHz will only add content above 22.05kHz, which will just be lost when you down sample back to 44.1kHz. Anything remaining above that frequency will be noise and will be filtered out during D/A conversion of the 44.1kHz sample.

It is known from the Shannon-Nyquist Theorem that for harmonic partials up to half the sample rate, the digital sample is an exact representation of the analog signal so there is no loss of information/detail in the audio up to 22.05kHz frequencies. If you want to release at 44.1kHz, sample at 44.1kHz.

Using 24 bit quanta is helpful if your source is an acoustic instrument, microphone, or digital instrument with 24-bit samples. Post-processing algorithms will have floating point roundoff errors that will accumulate (digital noise) and using 24-bits gives you a good chance of this not percolating into the 16 bits you care about. Dithering should be used when converting to 16-bit samples. But if your source is 16-bit digital content, 24-bit samples won’t help as much. You have already lost the dynamic range data that would be encoded in the extra 8 bits when the 16-bit sample was made. The main advantage is having plenty of dynamic range when doing the recording so that you don’t have to do precise gain staging or worry about clipping somewhere in the audio path. You can set gains conservatively and still have plenty of dynamic range to capture the 16 bits of dynamic range in the source.

Nord keyboard samples are 24 bits as far as I know.

[maxpiano]

On this topic and dynamic range, I was testing my home studio monitors today using the test audio files on https://www.audiocheck.net and ... see in particular their https://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_dynamiccheck.php, try it and then read and the "note" on that page about 16bit vs 24 bit

[mircolord]

I am not an expert on this, but I believe the 16 bit vs 24 bit would make a bigger difference when you are recording a live performance, where the volume levels will be uncertain. Clipping during the capture is fatal, so you have to avoid that by leaving some headroom. As the recording engineer for a live performance, you really don't know just how hard will the drummer whack the snare or the cymbal, or how loud the guitarist will get when the high energy moment arrives. So you end up having much of the capture take place well below the level at which clipping begins. In this scenario, I believe the 24 bit vs 16 bit advantage is large. But if you are just sampling something in a controlled environment, where you can precisely control the volume of what is captured, and do it over if you get it wrong, I believe the advantage for 24 bit will be much less.

I'm almost sure it's not like you are saying. When an analog signal is converted into digital, each voltage value is converted to a digital binary number at a frequency that now is not important. So with 16 bits you have 2^16 (65536) different numbers representing the various voltages of your signal. With 24 bit you can be more detailed because you have 16.777.216 numbers. I think this is like cutting a pizza in 8 or 16 pieces, the pizza is the same area but the slices are smaller. Audio-speaking, you can reconstruct your signal with more detail thanks to the fact you sampled the little differences.

However, if the smallest "slice" of signal is fixed, you are right and my answer can disappear in the void.

[PScooter63]

But wouldn’t that pizza be, like, 50% larger in diameter ?
Because the slices aren’t actually tinier, there’s just more of them.