9 ms·

I love the cool old audio gear! For the last 4 or 5 years, I have gotten heavily into the audio hobby. I've got to say, it's one of the most enjoyable hobbies

I love the cool old audio gear! For the last 4 or 5 years, I have gotten heavily into the audio hobby. I've got to say, it's one of the most enjoyable hobbies I've ever taken up. I know "audiophiles" get a bad rap with their needlessly expensive speaker cables, but I assure you 99.9% of hobbyists you'll find online are vehemently opposed to that kind of snake oil garbage. I also assure you (from one engineer to another) that the matter of "what sounds good" is actually a fairly objectively understood thing. It's not like art or wine tasting where things are almost entirely subjective. Audio does not need to be an expensive hobby. Even if you're buying new equipment, you can put together an absolutely fantastic system for a few hundred bucks. The best part is that audio gear doesn't become obsolete.‡ We as a human race have been building loudspeakers and amplifiers for about a century now and it's a fairly mature art. A kickass stereo you build today will sound great in 10, 20, 30 years. If you're willing to do a little DIY work, you can buy DIY speaker kits that outperform commercial offerings 2-3x the cost. This is a great cheap ($100) starter kit with lots of reviews online, and a video on the product page that shows you how to put it together. Compares well with $300-$500 commercial speakers. https://www.parts-express.com/c-note-mt-bookshelf-speaker-kit-pair-with-knock-down-cabinets--300-7140#lblSimilarProduct https://www.parts-express.com/c-note-mt-bookshelf-speaker-ki... If anybody has any questions about the hobby I'll try my best to answer them or at least point you in the right direction. --------- ‡ It doesn't become obsolete for the most part. Once you get into fancy digital codecs and home theater stuff, well, that's still an area of rapid flux. But good old RCA red-and-white L&R analog connectors (or the stereo mini jack, which is only a $3 adapter away) are still king in the world of stereo music. But what about all the hi-def audio stuff you see these days? The good news and bad news is that it's indistinguishable from good old 44.1khz/16bit audio like you'd find on a CD. Those engineers were very smart; 44/16 audio more than covers everything the human ear can hear.

isostatic 9y ago
48khz please! Not because of the extra frequency, but because of compatibility with video :) And RCA? What's wrong with balanced audio on an XLR? I saw a lovely post on Facebook about how a freelancer had brought in something odd, that could only get the audio out of via analog. He proudly came out with his crappy £50 RCA cables. We had to tell him that we only dealt with balanced audio. My friend went to the stores and found the most beat up converter she could find, and some ropey looking cables :)
- jdietrich 9y ago
  >And RCA? What's wrong with balanced audio on an XLR? There's nothing wrong with it, it's just totally unnecessary for line level signals over short cable runs in domestic environments. Balanced cabling doesn't sound any better, it just has better EMI rejection.
  - isostatic 9y ago
    Sure, and you never get EMI sources in a domestic environment, say mobile phones. If you're building a system from scratch, you may as well use balanced audio, the driver costs under a fiver.
  - squeaky-clean 9y ago
    > Balanced cabling doesn't sound any better, it just has better EMI rejection. Unfortunately for me, when you live downtown near a radio station that leaks into all your audio equipment, better EMI rejection definitely sounds better.
- crtasm 9y ago
  Reminds me of dropping off a composite/svideo video mixer as a favour loan to someone running an event and their first question being "so how do I plug my Macbook pro into this?" Is £50 a typo?
kokey 9y ago
DIY speakers, if you get the basics of speaker design right, can be really good. It's because if you build them yourself you can build an enclosure as big as you like, as thick and heavy as you like, with enough dampening as you like and as long as you balance the drivers and crossover right they can sound fantastic and for not much money. Also amplifiers since the 1990s have been great, they just need a service with some fresh capacitors and some hack (e.g. a smart plug) to deal with the fact that they suck power when on/standby but not in use, so getting a good one second hand is worth it. That said IC amps have improved a lot too and kits with these are also now easier since getting a clean power supply is not as difficult as it used to be.
titzer 9y ago
> But what about all the hi-def audio stuff you see these days? The good news and bad news is that it's indistinguishable from good old 44.1khz/16bit audio like you'd find on a CD. Those engineers were very smart; 44/16 audio more than covers everything the human ear can hear. Yes, but more channels are better. The spatial resolution of human hearing is pretty impressive, and stereo+headphones doesn't really do it justice.
- jdietrich 9y ago
  You only need two channels to provide complete spatial information through headphones if it's a binaural recording. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd5i7TlpzCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd5i7TlpzCk Dolby Atmos is the latest multichannel audio format; rather than mixing down to a fixed 5.1 or 7.1 master, an Atmos master carries spatial metadata that can be decoded and rendered to any array of loudspeakers, from a binaural mix for headphones to a 24.1.10 home theater setup. Windows and Xbox One both support Dolby Atmos support; Windows also has a native spatial post-processor called Windows Sonic. https://www.dolby.com/us/en/professional/content-creation/dolby-atmos.html https://www.dolby.com/us/en/professional/content-creation/do... https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/mt807491(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/mt8...
  - titzer 9y ago
    > You only need two channels to provide complete spatial information through headphones if it's a binaural recording. I don't really believe this, given the shape of the human ear and my own experience trying to reproduce 3d sound. Humans can judge direction and distance remarkably well up to a few dozen meters.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      Parent mentioned a binaural recording. Those needs specialized equipment to be recorded -- and can indeed reproduce the 3d spatiality of the sound (sic). In fact there are 3d sound processors that can do very impressive things even without headphones (e.g. some from Roland).
jk2323 9y ago
A word of caution. I looked into this and it seems extraordinary complex to design your own speakers. Even build them seems tricky. Here is a German shop that sells kits: https://acoustic-design-online.de/de/ https://acoustic-design-online.de/de/ They had once kits to build your own electrostatic speaker (warning, high voltage, danger!): http://silberstatic.de/ http://silberstatic.de/
- MrBuddyCasino 9y ago
  IMHO the Acoustic Design ones look like DYI, the C-Note doesn't.
MrBuddyCasino 9y ago
Unfortunately ~100$ shipping to Germany. :-/
cat199 9y ago
> But what about all the hi-def audio stuff you see these days? The good news and bad news is that it's indistinguishable from good old 44.1khz/16bit audio like you'd find on a CD. Not true at all.. Just because 44/16 well covers the frequency and amplitude domain of human hearing, it doesn't mean that the representation of the waveforms within that domain are precise. Other digital systems like 96/24 and variable encodings are much better at this because of the higher sampling rate and precision, and have much less error due to quantizing jitter. Anyone with a decent set of ears and a bit of patience/training can learn to tell the difference in quality, and once recognized, the difference is quite clear. I will agree that although clear, the difference is still subtle, and 44/16 is generally pretty good.
- louthy 9y ago
  > Not true at all.. Not true at all.. the bit rate will only affect the noise floor, you'd be hard pressed to notice any difference between 16 and 24 bits (you won't). And when it comes to the Hz - (width of the time-slice, 44 / 96) that will only make any difference on super high frequency sounds, but again, even with that the vast majority of people will perceive no difference. Band limited sound waves can only solve to one solution, and making the slices smaller in the time domain will have relatively little effect because you can perfectly represent all signals in the range of human hearing at 44khz sample rate. Higher bit rates are useful for people using DAWs like Cubase, ProTools, etc. where your 'signal' is going through myriad processing and summing stages because of the use of multiple tracks, plugins, etc. (sometimes hundreds) That's when you don't want the artifacting from summing multiple approximations. I use 32bit / 96khz in Cubase for this reason. The human brain is very good at convincing itself [3] that it can tell the difference, but in a double blind test you'd have no chance. Useful info and reference: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli... [3] http://www.image-line.com/support/FLHelp/html/app_audio.htm http://www.image-line.com/support/FLHelp/html/app_audio.htm
  - isolli 9y ago
    How about percussive sounds, such as a cymbal crash? These show very high frequencies in a Fourier analysis. Wouldn't that invalidate the application of the Nyquist-Shannon theorem?
OmIsMyShield 9y ago
I would love to get into this, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Any specific beginner-friendly resources that you would recommend? I thought of starting with something small and defined, like upgrading my TV's sound but even that comes with a variety of bewildering options.
- pecg 9y ago
  If you are into headphones, you could start hanging out on the subreddit. It's a big community, and you'll see many of the current technologies. It could get really expensive, I mean the new Sennheiser closed-back HD820 has a ~$2k price tag (ouch!), but certainly you could call yourself done with a $400 dollar setup, including DAC and Amplifier. EDIT: You could also try IEMs, Etymotic makes some of the most clear, coherent, natural and neutral sounding. Their TOTL (Top-Of-The-Line) is the ER4 line which has a MSRP of $350, but you could get the same value with the ER3 line at $179.
- louthy 9y ago
  The first thing to do if you want the best quality sound is to sort out the acoustics in the room you're in. Do that before buying or building any high end gear, otherwise you're just throwing money away. Shit speakers in a well treated room will sound better than the most expensive ones in a poorly treated one. Get yourself a reference/measurement microphone so you can measure the room, then use REM [1] to analyse the results (it's free). The Behringer ECM8000 is fine ($50), you don't need to spend a lot of money on that. You put the reference mic at your ideal listening position (you're not going to make an entire room acoustically perfect without needing a second mortgage, even high end studios aren't). What you want to get to is a flat response across the frequency range. You won't get it, and you will need bass traps, mid traps, etc. to fix the problems. If you're doing it for your TV then you can get attractive looking traps that don't look ugly. But if you're doing it for music, and you want lots of bass, then you may end up with big bass traps in the corner of the room. Although the PSI Audio AVAAs [2] are another (more expensive) option for trapping bass without taking up any more space than a regular speaker. I trialled a couple of these and they were exceptional. Depending on how bad the room is you can use room correction systems to fix it. I use a Trinnov ST2 Pro [3] (on top of a treated room) in my studio and the difference is astonishing. This is my frequency response before and after the Trinnov [4] Once you have got your room acoustics to a pretty good place, then the world's your oyster in terms of audio gear and speakers. I would advise against getting trapped in the super expensive audiophile world, you won't get much difference once you're above the $10k speakers range, and actually you can get results which will blow your mind with $1k speakers. Building your own is tough, because the dimensions are so critical, but if you're up for the challenge, it could be worth it! I've spent a large amount of time in this world because I've built a high-end music studio in my house. And going much beyond this advice isn't worth it. You need to go and listen for yourself and work out what you like. But acoustics will always win over gear, always. [1] https://www.roomeqwizard.com/ https://www.roomeqwizard.com/ [2] http://www.emerginguk.com/?portfolio=psi-audio-avaa-c20 http://www.emerginguk.com/?portfolio=psi-audio-avaa-c20 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBpEpvmo-GA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBpEpvmo-GA [4] https://imgur.com/a/LTXinuL https://imgur.com/a/LTXinuL
pecg 9y ago
I agree with you on 16/44.1 audio, I have a transparent DAC that can output 24/96, and on repeated blind tests I have failed to identify which is which, using files from the same source (a 24/96 song converted to 16/44.1). For audio production and mixing 24/96 makes a lot of sense though, because of dynamic range.
- louthy 9y ago
  > For audio production and mixing 24/96 makes a lot of sense though, because of dynamic range. Obviously only the bit-rate matters for dynamic range, and a 16 bit signal has 96 dB of dynamic range. That is more than enough for even the most dynamic of audio signals. A larger bit rate is useful for lots of digital summing as I mention here [1] and I assume what you allude to, but for most home applications nobody needs 16bit+ for anything other than improving their noise floor (which is still borderline inaudible at 16bit). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995020
  - squeaky-clean 9y ago
    > A larger bit rate is useful for lots of digital summing as I mention here [1] and I assume what you allude to, but for most home applications nobody Yeah that's why they said audio production, and not home use. 96db of dynamic range sounds like a lot, but not when you're stacking 45 tracks. Also compression and saturation later in the chain will further bring up that noise floor. And you don't get that full dynamic range because you want to prevent clipping in a recording, so you give yourself something like 12db of headroom away from the maximum, and now you've lost a good chunk of your dynamic range. 24 bit recording lets you keep plenty of maximum headroom while also staying far from your noise floor.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - louthy 9y ago
      > Yeah that's why they said audio production, and not home use. Yes, but the comment was specifically about dynamic range in audio production, not about higher bit rate's prime benefit of reducing artefacts in digital summing. The noise floor at 16 bit is -96db, if you're down there, you're doing it wrong. > 96db of dynamic range sounds like a lot, but not when you're stacking 45 tracks. Also compression and saturation later in the chain will further bring up that noise floor. It's more than enough if you're doing proper gain staging - the number of tracks is irrelevant. Any mastering compression of more than 3db gain reduction is mostly excessive, but let's say 6db. So a final master will bring up a noise floor 18db at most (if gain staging was done properly and as you say you left plenty of headroom for the mastering engineer - although clearly you wouldn't be able to use all the headroom). That's still a noise floor of less than -78db, but more realistically around -85db. Saturation usually only add harmonics not gain (obviously depends on the kit you're using). > And you don't get that full dynamic range because you want to prevent clipping in a recording, so you give yourself something like 12db of headroom away from the maximum, and now you've lost a good chunk of your dynamic range. 24 bit recording lets you keep plenty of maximum headroom while also staying far from your noise floor. Myth. Watch this [1] and you'll realise that there's plenty of range with 16 bit. People were producing with 16 bit for years perfectly fine. Before that high end studio tape machines (like the classic Studers or Telefunkens) were equivalent to about 14-16 bits (based on their noise floor) and we had decades of music produced and recorded on that format. I am not saying that 24 bit isn't better than 16 bit. Of course it is, there are tangible benefits in summing and it gives you more headroom to work with. But, I'm saying it's a myth that there's not enough dynamic range or that you're somehow just bumping along above the noise floor. If you are then you're doing it wrong. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

isostatic 9y ago

48khz please! Not because of the extra frequency, but because of compatibility with video :) And RCA? What's wrong with balanced audio on an XLR? I saw a lovely post on Facebook about how a freelancer had brought in something odd, that could only get the audio out of via analog. He proudly came out with his crappy £50 RCA cables. We had to tell him that we only dealt with balanced audio. My friend went to the stores and found the most beat up converter she could find, and some ropey looking cables :)

jdietrich 9y ago
>And RCA? What's wrong with balanced audio on an XLR? There's nothing wrong with it, it's just totally unnecessary for line level signals over short cable runs in domestic environments. Balanced cabling doesn't sound any better, it just has better EMI rejection.
- isostatic 9y ago
  Sure, and you never get EMI sources in a domestic environment, say mobile phones. If you're building a system from scratch, you may as well use balanced audio, the driver costs under a fiver.
- squeaky-clean 9y ago
  > Balanced cabling doesn't sound any better, it just has better EMI rejection. Unfortunately for me, when you live downtown near a radio station that leaks into all your audio equipment, better EMI rejection definitely sounds better.
crtasm 9y ago
Reminds me of dropping off a composite/svideo video mixer as a favour loan to someone running an event and their first question being "so how do I plug my Macbook pro into this?" Is £50 a typo?

kokey 9y ago

DIY speakers, if you get the basics of speaker design right, can be really good. It's because if you build them yourself you can build an enclosure as big as you like, as thick and heavy as you like, with enough dampening as you like and as long as you balance the drivers and crossover right they can sound fantastic and for not much money. Also amplifiers since the 1990s have been great, they just need a service with some fresh capacitors and some hack (e.g. a smart plug) to deal with the fact that they suck power when on/standby but not in use, so getting a good one second hand is worth it. That said IC amps have improved a lot too and kits with these are also now easier since getting a clean power supply is not as difficult as it used to be.

titzer 9y ago

> But what about all the hi-def audio stuff you see these days? The good news and bad news is that it's indistinguishable from good old 44.1khz/16bit audio like you'd find on a CD. Those engineers were very smart; 44/16 audio more than covers everything the human ear can hear. Yes, but more channels are better. The spatial resolution of human hearing is pretty impressive, and stereo+headphones doesn't really do it justice.

jdietrich 9y ago
You only need two channels to provide complete spatial information through headphones if it's a binaural recording. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd5i7TlpzCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd5i7TlpzCk Dolby Atmos is the latest multichannel audio format; rather than mixing down to a fixed 5.1 or 7.1 master, an Atmos master carries spatial metadata that can be decoded and rendered to any array of loudspeakers, from a binaural mix for headphones to a 24.1.10 home theater setup. Windows and Xbox One both support Dolby Atmos support; Windows also has a native spatial post-processor called Windows Sonic. https://www.dolby.com/us/en/professional/content-creation/dolby-atmos.html https://www.dolby.com/us/en/professional/content-creation/do... https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/mt807491(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/mt8...
- titzer 9y ago
  > You only need two channels to provide complete spatial information through headphones if it's a binaural recording. I don't really believe this, given the shape of the human ear and my own experience trying to reproduce 3d sound. Humans can judge direction and distance remarkably well up to a few dozen meters.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    Parent mentioned a binaural recording. Those needs specialized equipment to be recorded -- and can indeed reproduce the 3d spatiality of the sound (sic). In fact there are 3d sound processors that can do very impressive things even without headphones (e.g. some from Roland).

jk2323 9y ago

A word of caution. I looked into this and it seems extraordinary complex to design your own speakers. Even build them seems tricky. Here is a German shop that sells kits: https://acoustic-design-online.de/de/ https://acoustic-design-online.de/de/ They had once kits to build your own electrostatic speaker (warning, high voltage, danger!): http://silberstatic.de/ http://silberstatic.de/

MrBuddyCasino 9y ago
IMHO the Acoustic Design ones look like DYI, the C-Note doesn't.

MrBuddyCasino 9y ago

Unfortunately ~100$ shipping to Germany. :-/

cat199 9y ago

> But what about all the hi-def audio stuff you see these days? The good news and bad news is that it's indistinguishable from good old 44.1khz/16bit audio like you'd find on a CD. Not true at all.. Just because 44/16 well covers the frequency and amplitude domain of human hearing, it doesn't mean that the representation of the waveforms within that domain are precise. Other digital systems like 96/24 and variable encodings are much better at this because of the higher sampling rate and precision, and have much less error due to quantizing jitter. Anyone with a decent set of ears and a bit of patience/training can learn to tell the difference in quality, and once recognized, the difference is quite clear. I will agree that although clear, the difference is still subtle, and 44/16 is generally pretty good.

louthy 9y ago
> Not true at all.. Not true at all.. the bit rate will only affect the noise floor, you'd be hard pressed to notice any difference between 16 and 24 bits (you won't). And when it comes to the Hz - (width of the time-slice, 44 / 96) that will only make any difference on super high frequency sounds, but again, even with that the vast majority of people will perceive no difference. Band limited sound waves can only solve to one solution, and making the slices smaller in the time domain will have relatively little effect because you can perfectly represent all signals in the range of human hearing at 44khz sample rate. Higher bit rates are useful for people using DAWs like Cubase, ProTools, etc. where your 'signal' is going through myriad processing and summing stages because of the use of multiple tracks, plugins, etc. (sometimes hundreds) That's when you don't want the artifacting from summing multiple approximations. I use 32bit / 96khz in Cubase for this reason. The human brain is very good at convincing itself [3] that it can tell the difference, but in a double blind test you'd have no chance. Useful info and reference: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli... [3] http://www.image-line.com/support/FLHelp/html/app_audio.htm http://www.image-line.com/support/FLHelp/html/app_audio.htm
- isolli 9y ago
  How about percussive sounds, such as a cymbal crash? These show very high frequencies in a Fourier analysis. Wouldn't that invalidate the application of the Nyquist-Shannon theorem?

OmIsMyShield 9y ago

I would love to get into this, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Any specific beginner-friendly resources that you would recommend? I thought of starting with something small and defined, like upgrading my TV's sound but even that comes with a variety of bewildering options.

pecg 9y ago
If you are into headphones, you could start hanging out on the subreddit. It's a big community, and you'll see many of the current technologies. It could get really expensive, I mean the new Sennheiser closed-back HD820 has a ~$2k price tag (ouch!), but certainly you could call yourself done with a $400 dollar setup, including DAC and Amplifier. EDIT: You could also try IEMs, Etymotic makes some of the most clear, coherent, natural and neutral sounding. Their TOTL (Top-Of-The-Line) is the ER4 line which has a MSRP of $350, but you could get the same value with the ER3 line at $179.
louthy 9y ago
The first thing to do if you want the best quality sound is to sort out the acoustics in the room you're in. Do that before buying or building any high end gear, otherwise you're just throwing money away. Shit speakers in a well treated room will sound better than the most expensive ones in a poorly treated one. Get yourself a reference/measurement microphone so you can measure the room, then use REM [1] to analyse the results (it's free). The Behringer ECM8000 is fine ($50), you don't need to spend a lot of money on that. You put the reference mic at your ideal listening position (you're not going to make an entire room acoustically perfect without needing a second mortgage, even high end studios aren't). What you want to get to is a flat response across the frequency range. You won't get it, and you will need bass traps, mid traps, etc. to fix the problems. If you're doing it for your TV then you can get attractive looking traps that don't look ugly. But if you're doing it for music, and you want lots of bass, then you may end up with big bass traps in the corner of the room. Although the PSI Audio AVAAs [2] are another (more expensive) option for trapping bass without taking up any more space than a regular speaker. I trialled a couple of these and they were exceptional. Depending on how bad the room is you can use room correction systems to fix it. I use a Trinnov ST2 Pro [3] (on top of a treated room) in my studio and the difference is astonishing. This is my frequency response before and after the Trinnov [4] Once you have got your room acoustics to a pretty good place, then the world's your oyster in terms of audio gear and speakers. I would advise against getting trapped in the super expensive audiophile world, you won't get much difference once you're above the $10k speakers range, and actually you can get results which will blow your mind with $1k speakers. Building your own is tough, because the dimensions are so critical, but if you're up for the challenge, it could be worth it! I've spent a large amount of time in this world because I've built a high-end music studio in my house. And going much beyond this advice isn't worth it. You need to go and listen for yourself and work out what you like. But acoustics will always win over gear, always. [1] https://www.roomeqwizard.com/ https://www.roomeqwizard.com/ [2] http://www.emerginguk.com/?portfolio=psi-audio-avaa-c20 http://www.emerginguk.com/?portfolio=psi-audio-avaa-c20 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBpEpvmo-GA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBpEpvmo-GA [4] https://imgur.com/a/LTXinuL https://imgur.com/a/LTXinuL

pecg 9y ago

I agree with you on 16/44.1 audio, I have a transparent DAC that can output 24/96, and on repeated blind tests I have failed to identify which is which, using files from the same source (a 24/96 song converted to 16/44.1). For audio production and mixing 24/96 makes a lot of sense though, because of dynamic range.

louthy 9y ago
> For audio production and mixing 24/96 makes a lot of sense though, because of dynamic range. Obviously only the bit-rate matters for dynamic range, and a 16 bit signal has 96 dB of dynamic range. That is more than enough for even the most dynamic of audio signals. A larger bit rate is useful for lots of digital summing as I mention here [1] and I assume what you allude to, but for most home applications nobody needs 16bit+ for anything other than improving their noise floor (which is still borderline inaudible at 16bit). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995020
- squeaky-clean 9y ago
  > A larger bit rate is useful for lots of digital summing as I mention here [1] and I assume what you allude to, but for most home applications nobody Yeah that's why they said audio production, and not home use. 96db of dynamic range sounds like a lot, but not when you're stacking 45 tracks. Also compression and saturation later in the chain will further bring up that noise floor. And you don't get that full dynamic range because you want to prevent clipping in a recording, so you give yourself something like 12db of headroom away from the maximum, and now you've lost a good chunk of your dynamic range. 24 bit recording lets you keep plenty of maximum headroom while also staying far from your noise floor.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - louthy 9y ago
    > Yeah that's why they said audio production, and not home use. Yes, but the comment was specifically about dynamic range in audio production, not about higher bit rate's prime benefit of reducing artefacts in digital summing. The noise floor at 16 bit is -96db, if you're down there, you're doing it wrong. > 96db of dynamic range sounds like a lot, but not when you're stacking 45 tracks. Also compression and saturation later in the chain will further bring up that noise floor. It's more than enough if you're doing proper gain staging - the number of tracks is irrelevant. Any mastering compression of more than 3db gain reduction is mostly excessive, but let's say 6db. So a final master will bring up a noise floor 18db at most (if gain staging was done properly and as you say you left plenty of headroom for the mastering engineer - although clearly you wouldn't be able to use all the headroom). That's still a noise floor of less than -78db, but more realistically around -85db. Saturation usually only add harmonics not gain (obviously depends on the kit you're using). > And you don't get that full dynamic range because you want to prevent clipping in a recording, so you give yourself something like 12db of headroom away from the maximum, and now you've lost a good chunk of your dynamic range. 24 bit recording lets you keep plenty of maximum headroom while also staying far from your noise floor. Myth. Watch this [1] and you'll realise that there's plenty of range with 16 bit. People were producing with 16 bit for years perfectly fine. Before that high end studio tape machines (like the classic Studers or Telefunkens) were equivalent to about 14-16 bits (based on their noise floor) and we had decades of music produced and recorded on that format. I am not saying that 24 bit isn't better than 16 bit. Of course it is, there are tangible benefits in summing and it gives you more headroom to work with. But, I'm saying it's a myth that there's not enough dynamic range or that you're somehow just bumping along above the noise floor. If you are then you're doing it wrong. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM