What is the difference between 24 bit and 32 bit

I think it would take quite a bit of accumulated rounding off for this to be audible in such high resolutions as 24 and 32 fp. I'm not doubting anyone, just need the demo. On the serious note Well, the 5" display to which our life has been reduced looks significantly better than any TV from my youth.

You just have to hold it closer to your face. Oh I also remember recording songs from the radio onto tape. As if tape weren't bad enough! Or if you were really serious, buying both record and cassette to have the best possible version in both media Things haven't gotten much worse since CDs.

They just haven't gotten to the point where everyone cares about the most perfect representation of the medium Sue me if my Galaxy S6 with its included earbuds sounds great to me compared to any portable device I've ever used up until now.

I'm not the only one who does this either. None of this means you can't work at a higher bit depth while mixing. There's a point of diminishing returns of course. And as long as you don't Neil Young yourself with the final mix, it's all good. Most won't hear the more picky aspects of the mix, but some will. Nothing has changed in that regard in the market.

There have always been people that listen to music casually and don't ever set themselves up at home for it. But at the end of the day, the better the master sounds, the better the gadgetized reproduction sounds. All good. There is certainly a lot of low budget production out there today. It's additional to the real stuff though, not in place of it.

Some of that low budget stuff comes out of major studios. Comes across as cheap. A lot of people are satisfied by cheapness. Too bad for them. Lots of great work available and HD formats to hear it with out there. It's OK if there's shitty music out there too.

In regards to sample rates, audio converters may behave different at 96kHz vs So you may be able to "hear a difference", but prefer the IMHO isn't possible to hear any difference between 24 and 32 bit. I made myself a little project with onboard Reaper plugins to play with bit depth. Output is muted for safety reasons. Here's a trick from Ethan Winer if i remember correctly how to "hide" dB below 16 bit's 96 dB SN ratio sound information in a 16 bit file with applying dithering noise.

Just turn dither on or off in dropdown menu. Do not bypass dither plugin! Maybe playing with signal gen volume, bit depths and applying noise and looking to the analysers will someone like me make to get closer to the truth. I think you'd have to process the file so much that most people would get bored long before they did, or would have to want to spend the effort on setting up some kind of implausible batch process.

I think the Audacity wiki gives a good summary: "Audacity uses "float" format for bit recording instead of fixed integer format as normalized floating point values are quicker and easier to process on computers than fixed integer values and allow greater dynamic range to be retained even after editing.

This is because intermediate signals during audio processing can have very variable values. If they all get truncated to a fixed integer format, you can't boost them back up to full scale without losing resolution i.

With floating point, rounding errors during intermediate processing are negligible. The theoretically audible advantage of this is that bit floating point format retains the original noise floor, and does not add noise. For example, with fixed integer data, applying a compressor effect to lower the peaks by 9 dB and separately amplifying back up would cost 9 dB or more than 2 bits of signal to noise ratio SNR.

If done with floating point data, the SNR of the peaks remains as good as before except that the quiet passages are 9 dB louder and so 9 dB noisier due to the noise they had in the first place. Oh, and anyone saying that any differences between 16bit and 24bit are inaudible in any context either have never had to mix on a 16bit system or need to see their doctor about their hearing.

For a final format, 16bit is normally fine, because the dynamic range has been reduced to fit comfortably in it, and dithering hides any low level distortion not masked in the mix. I've ramped the gain up in these examples so that it is easy to hear. It is most noticeable with cymbals, I find. And this is about processing a 16 bit file vs. The attack of the cymbals are irrelevant, listen to the decay at the end of the files.

Hear, hear! Going from a 24bit system to a 32bit FP, or from that to 64bit FP has been absolutely unnoticeable. Nope, because the DSP will happen at bit float. If the bit recordings are well done they'll be processed at bit float or double precision like everything else and you won't hear any difference.

Where the big difference came, for those that can recall, is when workstations started doing dsp processing in bit float. Before then the mix quality with digital kinda comparitively sucked. But if you can actually find a workstation that does all of it's DSP processing in bit, yeah, you'd hear a difference. I'll add as a side note that imo the overwhelming majority of people arguing about this stuff on the net don't have anything close to an optimum monitoring environment.

Not "you" specifically JBM. I don't see this discussion even worth having on my part, then - I mean - it doesn't seem to matter to anyone except those who do this for scientific curiosity I would think that if you have a facility from which you earn your living then you would have a justified interest in testing these things. For me, I was happy enough with 24bit fixed systems, then 32bit meant I really didn't have to care anymore, 64bit internal processing literally means nothing to me from any practical standpoint :.

Karbo regualrly implies that most of the people talking about it have issues far more immediate and crucial than sample rate, bit depth, dither, or the latest cool plugin, or most any other audio minutia, but people largely ignore him when he implies that. They either have GAS as a hobby, or they have anti-GAS as a hobby spending all their time trying to prove that all the toys GAS addicts buy can be perfectly replicated for free, or debunking marketing hype.

I actually think quite the opposite ;. I actually think quite the opposite ; Well, there's precious few facilities left, but back in the day when people made money from selling records they would employ scientific types to do all kinds of testing and designing.

A few still do. I don't know, I guess if you are on the cutting edge, but this stuff is pretty much proven and set. I would rather concentrate on other matters. It's certainly interesting, though. Oh yeah, you're right. I was talking about when new technologies first come out. I'm like you, it interests me on some levels, but it's not anything that enters my head when I'm actually making or mixing music :.

Well, there's precious few facilities left, but back in the day when people made money from selling records they would employ scientific types to do all kinds of testing and designing.

When people are audio engineers in the most legit sense, they do that anyway because that's all they do, work hard to get the best quality out of everything. They also commonly test things that most home users never even think about, like the polarity of all their new audio gear.

They do it because that's what real engineers of every type always do, sweat all the minor details. Engineering is about more than "how to use a plugin or how to make a decent recording or mix", they know and do a lot more than that.

The problem with the discussion is that most of us aren't really audio engineers, we're mostly just guys who like mixing and stuff and it makes us feel good to pretend to be real engineers in the more literal sense so we waste too much time talking about relative scientific minutia. It's just the Internet. If you go to a car enthusiast forum you'll find some guys who just got a fast car yesterday talking about or arguing about low level automotive engineering concepts that they got from Google or another forum or something.

None of it will help them drive the car better or faster, but they argue about it repeatedly anyway because guys males just always do that. You also have the "democratisation of the internet" crowd who like to deride "golden ears" and mistake an internet list of logical fallacies appeal to authority in particular for being a sound justification for discounting knowledge, skill and experience. I've always been happy to call myself an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to mixing, and there's no way I would ever call myself an engineer!

There was a time when the engineering part truly mattered aka in analog, in that realm a good engineer often and in no uncertain terms had the equivalent of a college education in actual audio engineering even if only via trial and error because if they didn't know the gear and especially how audio behaved electrically in addition to how it sounded, they'd end up with problems that can't be fixed later or even blowing something up - not minutia like this thread but real problems.

That's where the term 'audio engineer' came from, it was real engineering. My poking fun in previous replies was in relation to that because what we have to actually worry about and measure these days is like. When I mentioned the difference being hearing a gnat fly by while you are operating a jackhammer it is fairly accurate via math so this is a question that unless one is designing gear, shouldn't very rarely if ever be debated.

Or better yet, show me, I'm all ears but if we don't even have gear to demonstrate it, it becomes ridiculously irrelevant doesn't it? Another angle is that if we still had to worry 'that much' in , why didn't we just stay in analog.

Despite all of the "tips" those guys give out on the net in public, you'd be surprised to learn what they don't tell people. They made me think about things that both never actually even occurred to me and never would have, but also never show up on typical daw forum discussions.

It's really humbling, to do your very best and come up so short, and hear some things you'd never hear on public forums. And being private there is zero noise. They some of them tell you just enough in public to make a few bucks on a paid video tutorial site, far from being close to everything they know and do.

Their knowledge is passed on from years of working with people, interning their way up in real studios, etc, etc. If I had a dollar for everytime I thought "Damn, I would have never thought of that.

I am not. If not for many years working for the phone company I probably wouldn't even know how to solder a patch bay. I'm on a FB group like that for famous guitarists, you'll see the occasional "how'd you record the guitar in famous song x bob" and the reply will be something you never even dreamed.

They some of them tell you just enough to make a few bucks on a paid video tutorial site, far from being close to everything they know and do. He was talking about how annoying it is to have kids shove business cards in his hand with the title "producer" on them.

Saying your are something does not make it so. This is NOT a conversation about digitizing an analog source with 32 bit hardware converters. But this post asked about comparing a mix from at most 24 bit sources stored to a 32 bit fp container vs. Said mix being made on a digital board - Reaper - with 64 bit fp internal bussing. People keep replying as though to suggest that the container you put your mix into can somehow change the source material.

Shrodinger's mix? I mean, the principles are right there - use em. Maybe it's easy for me to say over a decade down the road Honestly, this one guy played an orchestral recording and mix he did and it sounded The depth of field was amazing. It was even more shocking when he told everyone the size of the room he recorded it in, a rather tiny space. He then described how he setup the mics to get that big sound and I was like It sounded like it was recorded in a huge sound stage with lots of ambient mics.

You gonna share? Yeah, but Pro Tools sounds more crisp and Ableton has more bass :p. This along with the fact that storing a 24 bit source file in a 32 bit fp container or a processed version of it in a 32 bit fp container is a very different subject that digitizing an analog signal into 16 bits vs 24 bits. The question was can you hear the difference which implies a 32 bit file going through DA, we later moved the goal posts to containers because there is no such thing as hearing 32 bit at this point.

Serr: I would but if the person wanted his technique for that shared in public and posted all over the net he would do that, so me doing that here would be kinda rude. I can't really recreate it in my space anyway, the "realtively tiny room" he used was still a good room and mine kinda isn't.

These really good guys Lawrence speaks of did that and they are also likely just damn intelligent to begin with which doesn't hurt. Typically ya can't get there without trying out everything and stumbling a lot along the way; being willing to do that is golden.

The problem happens when people want tips and think that's the end of it It simply does not work that way but it is incredibly rewarding to figure it out after a decade of experience and become confident and consistent in what you are doing and knowing what do do BEFORE you hear it. Most of those guys came up the old fashioned way, interning. Not by reading tips, but learning things first hand in person from multiple different people along the way.

It's like anything else, there's only so much you can learn from reading, the real learning comes from observing and doing. Unfortunately for us, most of us are not in a position to observe multiple different really good audio engineers almost daily like they did as interns at Sony Studios or whatever years ago.

That is to say, you can graduate near the top of your class at Harvard Law but the real learning comes when you get in court with great lawyers. They did but it was also lots of tips just not via internet and home producers. Probably better worded as techniques at the time but actually doing it is what truly matters; nothing can or will ever replace that.

The collegiate style textbooks of that day are full of tips but more from a technical engineering perspective rather than how do I make my beats sound good perspective. That affords predictability and is one hell of a time saver, a few hundred bucks per hour you don't spend three days reamping the guitar cab typically.

There is creative experimentation and there is knowing what you are doing to the extent that you can pull it off consistently. There was no real internet back then so yeah, the tips were on the job mostly. It's similar to the difference of growing up in a musical family vs not. The latter, even when fairly talented is almost always playing a certain amount of catch up compared to the kid born into it. Ask me how I know that. Anyway, I just try to keep it in context for myself.

There was a time when I thought I was the shit, mixing, whatever, and later I started to listen better and be much more objective evaluating my own work, and the truth reveals itself quickly enough.

I hear that! It's true that some of the low budget stuff released these days can lull you into a false sense of greatness too! I settled into quoting a project rate. If it takes me longer than I thought to pull it off and it still does every fuckin time! If someone 'demands' to work by the hour, I try to convince them to go somewhere else that can pull that off.

Or I'll say OK, but that means at the end of X hours, it's all on you as producer. Weather anything is finished or turned out or whatever. I'm happy enough on my rung of the ladder. As we all should be which really drives home the lesson of the thread, in if you've spent any time at all on quality gear, it ain't the gear.

A lot of the inbformation is no longer seen as needed for what people, people like me, are doing these days I just saw this video today and thought about other information that is often over looked When you think about it, if you don't have a good grasp of this, you will always have trouble with mixing. I've seen that professor speak before, might have been this video but either way, I'm going to watch it again, thanks for posting.

When I was a 21 year old college student 43 years ago I took a course called 'Physics in the Arts'. Several weeks were devoted to waveform theory, Fletcher-Munson, and early synthesis techniques. It sparked a life-long interest in the technology of sound that aligned well with my desire to be a musician. When I was a 21 year old college student 43 years ago Same age here.. I went to electronics tech school in specializing in audio. Most of the class was musicians and we were all going to work in big shiny studios and only work on cool music Not sure how many actually ended up doing any recording.

I've spent the rest of my life recording, although most of it was recording myself in my fairly sophisticated home studio. But from age 21 I spent 17 years as a full-time musician, then got a degree in Comp Sci and spent 24 more as a Software Engineer.

I retired from my day job a couple of years ago, and am essentially a full-time musician again. And loving every minute of it. Same age here.. Think about that. The same goes for hiring good music producers, they aren't cheap for a good reason.

Most of us who make music for fun don't even spend a dime marketing our music The "democratization of music" is mostly perceptual, very few people doing it all themselves are finding any financial success. Truth be told, despite anyone with a decent job being able to afford to print CD's at DiscMakers and say "I made a record", many small project studios are doing what are essentially just good demos.

It's the rare bird, or the truly exceptional talent, that makes a CD at home and doesn't spend a dime on outside talent or marketing and sells , copies and actually makes some money.

The rest of us just throw our songs on iTunes and get our friends and family to buy a few copies. I was being told a while ago by an engineer that home and project studios are turning out better than ever results, especially in electronic music where no recording actually takes place. There's also a unique situation now. How about all those 'volume war' CD releases? Sounds like ass. For sure. Do people - honestly - believe that record companies spend many thousands of dollars hiring music producers, arrangers, engineers, vocal coaches, studios etc, etc, for something that anyone can do at home with a cool budget daw?

They would be complete idiots if that's true and all of those other people would be out of work. I've yet to personally meet - anyone ever - on a daw forum who did that at home or in their lab and sold more than a few hundred records over a couple of years.

The rap guys probably sell more mix tapes than most other unsigned artists though and performing rock bands can get their home baked CD sales up at their shows for sure.

But if you want to make real money, or you want your music played and enjoyed by millions of people all over the world, it's typically gonna cost some money All of that is to say that the "millions of people making records at home" are not really making records, they're mostly making good demos that some people buy. Of course, there are always exceptions from the extremely talented. I wouldn't have until I heard it myself. Heard any of those 'volume war' releases?

I know you have. Well it would be the opposite unfortunately. The marketing types figured out that it only has to be so good and the average consumer is none the wiser.

So they'd actually have a problem with someone putting in even a minute of extra work or effort. Autotune is cheaper than hiring a singer for the obvious example. OK, that's the worst case scenario with bottom of the barrel pop music. There are still lots records out there that humble me and make me think I should just give up.

There is absolutely amazing work coming out of the masters. But there is some pretty low budget stuff that can truly make the home studio guy seem like a big fish in a small pond too. Just saying, we all know, by and large, budgeted commercial label records sound better, even if some of it kinda obviously does suck.

Pretending otherwise is just pretending to feel better. I have old recordings here from say, Rick James, whatever, where I've not heard - anything - from any common home studio of truly comparable quality, ever.

Spend some real money and make a real record, and really promote it, and see what the world gives you back. You might get surprised. You can't take it with you. The only difference between him and many others is that he had the guts to try. Yes, it might be limited into obvious distortion, but it generally takes a very solid mix in the first place to be able to hammer material to that extent. You might not like it, and I'd agree with you as a matter of taste, but I feel it is a little myopic to say that it doesn't take skill.

It might not sound nice to those with discerning ears, but I don't know of any amateur productions who can compete in that aesthetic with the professionals.

That's a great point, it's a completely different ball game as soon as you reduce that limiting - the mix is likely outstanding so we can't just discount all the skills that fall before that limiter get's inserted. Yeah, this here mix was really classy and beyond anything some local yocal could do.

Sure, we never released that and instead made this crushed shitty sounding version. Yeah, a lot of local produced stuff sounds better But trust us, if you heard the actual mix before we stepped on it which you won't , you'd agree this is well, was world class.

No really! Part of my point actually, is this chirpy volume war CD business actually leveled the playing field for a lot of lo-fi stuff to tag along. That destroyed mix that was amazing but now sounds like shit is on the same level as the shitty local mix. At least for the iThing crowd. Right, many world-class mixers really are world-class and I'm sure many will tell you they sincerely hate what the industry does to their mixes in mastering smashing or what they are forced to do to them in mastering etc.

Then again, many are probably the type of people who don't trash their bosses publicly but you get the point. Yep, I'm aware of that. It's actually a regular occurrence that the mix engineer will demand their name be removed from the release! If you're Steve Wilson, you can demand that the discs be recalled and released properly. Oh, that's right, they're saving that for the deluxe box set.

Which might not ever happen and that's apparently fine But this mix can only be released in stepped on quality just in case we decide to release a deluxe version later for more money. Cheapness and greed! They will just 'remaster' them and make them even worse.

Sometimes multiple different mastered versions. It isn't until recent times and HD formats that that opportunity existed. Everything from revealing a masterpiece that was really stepped on in mastering to greatly improved and wouldn't be the same without it. Mastering is a stage and has nothing much to do with it. SNR- Signal-to-noise ratio is the difference between the desired signal and the background system noise.

In a digital system this is linked directly to the bit-depth. For comparison, bits of capture offers a signal to noise ratio the difference between the signal and background noise of So your bit DAC is actually only ever going to be able to output at most bits of useful data and the other bits will be masked by circuit noise. In reality though, most moderately priced pieces of equipment top out with an SNR of to dB, as most other circuit elements will introduce their own noise.

Clearly then, bit files already seem rather redundant. Most of the issues surrounding the understanding and misconception of audio is related to the way in which educational resources and companies attempt to explain the benefits using visual cues. You have probably all seen audio represented as a series of stair steps for bit-depth and rectangular looking lines for the sample rate.

However, this visual representation misrepresents how audio works. Picture this, even at the Nyquist frequency, which may often be represented as a square wave rather than a smooth sine wave, we have accurate data for the amplitude at a specific point in time, which is all we need. We humans are often mistakenly looking at the space in-between the samples, but a digital system does not operate in the same way.

An important fact to note is that all waveforms can be expressed as the sum of multiple sine waves, a fundamental frequency and additional components at harmonic multiples. A triangle wave or a stair step consists of odd harmonics at diminishing amplitudes. Furthermore, this would be quite simple to filter out using a few components.

If this is true, we should be able to observe this with a quick experiment. A bit or bit audio file would have far less noise on the signal both before and after filtering. Better yet, these are included as standard in most good quality DACs. Dealing with a more realistic example, any DAC for use with audio will also feature an interpolation filter, also known as up-sampling. The methods to do this can be quite complex, but essentially your DAC is changing its output value much more often than the sample frequency of your audio file would suggest.

This pushes the inaudible stair step harmonics far outside of the sampling frequency, allowing for the use of slower, more readily achievable filters that have less ripple, therefore preserving the bits that we actually want to hear.

Therefore, your kHz file would probably be causing more harm than good, if there was actually any ultra-sonic content contains within those files. The CS features an interpolation section and steep built in output filter. Different combinations of binary digits equate to different total voltages that travel to the speaker or headphone. In a 4-bit DAC, there are 16 possible combinations of binary digits that can be assigned, which means that there are 16 different voltages that can be sent to the speaker.

Higher voltages mean higher amplitudes and vice versa. A higher bit depth doesn't equate to higher audio quality, however. The important thing about higher bit depths is the reduction of digital noise. At lower bit depths, you hear much more digital noise. If you hear music using the aforementioned 4-bit DAC, you'd hear a ton of noise. When it comes to listening to music, you're going to want at least bit audio.

Even 8-bit audio has a lot of noise, as shown in the example below. That noticeable hiss in the background is the digital noise that's present with low-bit audio. We've been enjoying bit audio for decades, as audio on CDs is bit.

Here's the same music example below but rendered in bit audio; there's no hiss to be heard. This is because 8-bit audio has possible combinations of binary digits, while bit audio has 65,, which is an exponential increase.

Well, the standard bit depth for this for a long time was 16 bit. That was because to burn an audio file to an audio CD, the file has to be 16 bit.

But many online platforms now allow you to upload files at 24 bit. But is this really necessary? Well, even if you were working with really dynamic material like classical music for example, it would still only use about 50dB — 60dB of dynamic range at the most. The majority of other genres will use much less.

As such, the 96dB of dynamic range of 16 bit is more than adequate to represent the dynamic range of your music perfectly. Unlike fixed point bit depths, floating point bit depths are used only for internal processing in a DAW. That bounce needs to have a fixed point bit depth. So you would really only bounce down to 32 bit float if the audio file was going to be imported into a DAW. Unlike fixed point bit depths which have a ceiling at 0dBFS and a noise floor a certain distance beneath, 32 bit float uses its dynamic range differently.

So, is it better to work with 32 bit floating point files rather than 16 or 24 bit? Well, you can create 32 bit float files from the outset if you want. You do this by setting the bit depth of your session to 32 bit float before you record. That way, you will capture your audio at the fixed point bit depth that your interface is capable of, but it will be saved as a 32 bit float file. As such, I recommend that you set your session to 24 bit when you record, rather than 32 bit float.

You also have the ability to bounce down audio as a 32 bit floating point file. As I mentioned earlier, this should only be used if the audio file is going to be imported into a DAW. Bouncing 32 bit float files gives you an advantage that a fixed point bit depth file does not. It is still there and can be played without distortion by attenuating the clip gain to a level where the loudest peaks do not pass 0dBFS. With a fixed point bit depth however, this is not possible.

If audio is bounced to a fixed point bit depth and there is clipping, then the clipped audio would be lost and any resultant distortion is irresolvable when imported into a DAW.

But 32 bit float can offer that safety net. An additional benefit is that when you bounce to a 32 bit floating point bit depth, dither is not required. This is for two reasons. As such, these plugins will clip if the signal goes over 0dBFS.