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I had no idea FLAC didn't store 32-bit. I'll need to look over my library and make sure nothing strange is going on. I'm curious if sites like Qobuz will sudde

I had no idea FLAC didn't store 32-bit. I'll need to look over my library and make sure nothing strange is going on. I'm curious if sites like Qobuz will suddenly replace some of their existing files with higher-bit copies if they already had them and just had no way to encode them as FLAC.

klodolph 4y ago
It is extremely hard to justify 32-bit audio from a technical standpoint, since it requires that every component in your audio chain has better than 144 dB dynamic range. In practice, just about none of the analog components in your audio chain will have that kind of dynamic range, and any analog components in the recording chain are unlikely to have that range either. The kind of equipment I'd expect to see in order to record that kind of range is where you'd have something like multiple microphones, and switch back and forth between them based on the level of the material you're recording (which would have to be something like actual gunfire or explosions). I don't know what kind of equipment you'd need to reproduce this dynamic range, but I don't think it's audio equipment. My guess is that the main real application of this is going to be compression of non-audio data that happens to compress well with FLAC.
- simcop2387 4y ago
  I could see it as part of a pipeline/workflow where having that dynamic range lets you not worry about losing meaningful information through everything, even if you're going to compress it and take it back to 16bit cd quality at the end. Being able to losslessly store the results of each step in a FLAC file should be better than raw data since it'll be compressed and easier to manage then. That said, at the edges of that I totally agree even 24-bit can be questionable there since a lot of the analog side doesn't have a noise floor that would let it be meaningfully used.
  - klodolph 4y ago
    > That said, at the edges of that I totally agree even 24-bit can be questionable there since a lot of the analog side doesn't have a noise floor that would let it be meaningfully used. It's not that hard to beat 16-bit, which is 96 dB, using easy-to-find, off-the-shelf equipment. One example scenario is that you are recording something but you don't have a precise idea of how loud it will be ahead of time, so you record at low levels and rely on 24-bit capture to give you headroom above and noise floor below. Trying to capture at 16-bit can, in practice, be annoying and difficult because it is more likely that you will ruin takes by setting the gain wrong.
  - hunter2_ 4y ago
    The 55% compression ratio (or whatever the case may be) seems much more useful at the end (where it nearly doubles how long a consumer can listen before swapping media) then along the way (where it nearly doubles how much raw material a studio can capture before swapping media).
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Even if you did have a recording setup like that I'd expect it to work better with float samples.
- jrajav 4y ago
  You're absolutely right insofar as you're speaking about static audio that's already been produced and finished - there is almost no point in storing anything above 24-bit integer as far as dynamic range even for archival purposes. However, there is a legitimate purpose behind having higher dynamic range for production purposes and sample sources. There are some recording sources that can actually produce 32-bit audio. Plus, you might want to do some processing on the sound that would end up affecting the dynamic range, or otherwise benefit from the increased resolution. One example is nonlinear processing that generates new musical information from the original signal - you can of course just reduce the gain after processing, but you are then sacrificing some of the resolution of the new combined signal, which itself could otherwise be used by further downstream processes. This all happens post-recording, but can still be musically important before getting to the finished product. This is why DAWs work in 32-bit or 64-bit processing internally, and why many high-quality sample libraries will come in 32-bit, especially smaller one-shots. I often convert samples to .flac for space reasons, and have to either skip 32-bit .wavs or downsample them to 24.
  - klodolph 4y ago
    > However, there is a legitimate purpose behind having higher dynamic range for production purposes and sample sources. This is the justification for 24-bit audio... is there a reason why 24 bits is not enough here? If you're capturing audio sources directly, you'd use something like a 24-bit ADC, which you can find easily enough. The "raw" output of the ADC is 24 bits. If you're doing intermediate processing in your DAW, then the DAW is using single-precision floats (or possibly double), which cannot be losslessly converted either to 32 bit or 24 bit integers, so how would you choose the right format to store? It seems to me that you'd either store the original floating-point data, or you'd perform some kind of lossy conversion to a high-quality archival format... but if you do that, isn't 24 bits good enough? You're quantizing either way, and at 24 bits, you can have plenty of headroom and noise floor at the same time. Loads, even.
    - jrajav 4y ago
      There are two justifications, one, for recording - 24-bit is the standard in the studio yes (and more than you need for that context indeed), but 32-bit is more and more the standard for field recordings where the hardware is capable of it and it provides genuine utility, where you often have extremely soft and subtle sounds captured that you want to increase in gain to a more useful level. Also, once inside the digital world, there are many processes you can perform that add new musical information to the original sound that might be higher in gain but that you want to preserve for downstream processing until you're ready to actually "print" and quantize the final product, at which point, yes, 24-bit will be more than enough.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  Note that 144dB range is what you get from 24 bits per sample. 32 bits gets you another 48dB more. Some of your ADC/DAC chain can reasonably claim 125dB range. Some amplifiers can claim 17 or even 18 bits above their noise floor - 108dB. No full-spectrum microphones, headphones or speakers can reasonably claim 125dB without distortion, but if they did you would still want to limit your exposure to "never". Long-term damage begins with long-term exposure under 96dB.
  - klodolph 4y ago
    People will use microphones to record audio like gunshots and explosions for use as sound effects. The humble snare drum will produce loads of dBs too, and is usually close-miked. You then take the same microphone and use it to record something much quieter. You end up with microphones that definitely do reasonably claim >125 dB range. The TLM102 claims something like 130 dB. How much you care about distortion will depend on the situation. My thought is that it would be very hard to get that 130 dB range all the way from an audio source to your ADC, and it would be very hard to get it back out all the way to speakers again.
    - retcore 4y ago
      >The TLM102 claims something like 130 dB. How much you care about distortion will depend on the situation. Neumann makes no such claims. They do claim max spl of 144 dB. But the TLM and is 10 dB less and this is prior to ADC of variable ability. Distortion isn't a ceteris paribus value for signal to noise calculations.
      - klodolph 4y ago
        https://en-de.neumann.com/tlm-102 https://en-de.neumann.com/tlm-102 > Due to its enormous dynamic range of 132 dB [...] Not really interested in dissecting what this means, or how to reconcile it with the SNR numbers. Just saying that Neumann does, in fact, make this claim. Not sure what point you're making about distortion.
  - retcore 4y ago
- radiowave 4y ago
  In audio production, the relevance of 32 bit audio is that it's using the same 32 bit float representation of the audio that most of the signal processing stages are also using. In contrast, when people talk about 16 or 24 bit audio, they are customarily referring to an integer representation. In principle, every time you convert from the 32 bit float back to 24 bit integer, there's an opportunity for a careless human to screw up the scaling, and throw away some of the available integer range. Rinse and repeat until you have an audible problem. So this forms the basis for an argument in favour of keeping the audio in a float representation for as much of the production process as can reasonably be achieved. I don't see any benefit in 32 bit representation for delivery of the finished content, but I suppose that if, as part of the production process, you're transferring the audio online between different sites/people/whatever, then having lossless compression that works without having to convert back to integer might be useful. EDIT: Just read the thing more carefully, and realised that it's specifically talking about 32 bit int, NOT float. So right now, I can't see much practical use for this.
babypuncher 4y ago
I don't know that 32-bit audio is exactly common. As far as human hearing goes, 24-bit is already overkill. Even 16-bit should be an imperceptible downgrade for anything with a naturally low dynamic range (i.e. most music).

klodolph 4y ago

It is extremely hard to justify 32-bit audio from a technical standpoint, since it requires that every component in your audio chain has better than 144 dB dynamic range. In practice, just about none of the analog components in your audio chain will have that kind of dynamic range, and any analog components in the recording chain are unlikely to have that range either. The kind of equipment I'd expect to see in order to record that kind of range is where you'd have something like multiple microphones, and switch back and forth between them based on the level of the material you're recording (which would have to be something like actual gunfire or explosions). I don't know what kind of equipment you'd need to reproduce this dynamic range, but I don't think it's audio equipment. My guess is that the main real application of this is going to be compression of non-audio data that happens to compress well with FLAC.

simcop2387 4y ago
I could see it as part of a pipeline/workflow where having that dynamic range lets you not worry about losing meaningful information through everything, even if you're going to compress it and take it back to 16bit cd quality at the end. Being able to losslessly store the results of each step in a FLAC file should be better than raw data since it'll be compressed and easier to manage then. That said, at the edges of that I totally agree even 24-bit can be questionable there since a lot of the analog side doesn't have a noise floor that would let it be meaningfully used.
- klodolph 4y ago
  > That said, at the edges of that I totally agree even 24-bit can be questionable there since a lot of the analog side doesn't have a noise floor that would let it be meaningfully used. It's not that hard to beat 16-bit, which is 96 dB, using easy-to-find, off-the-shelf equipment. One example scenario is that you are recording something but you don't have a precise idea of how loud it will be ahead of time, so you record at low levels and rely on 24-bit capture to give you headroom above and noise floor below. Trying to capture at 16-bit can, in practice, be annoying and difficult because it is more likely that you will ruin takes by setting the gain wrong.
- hunter2_ 4y ago
  The 55% compression ratio (or whatever the case may be) seems much more useful at the end (where it nearly doubles how long a consumer can listen before swapping media) then along the way (where it nearly doubles how much raw material a studio can capture before swapping media).
Dylan16807 4y ago
Even if you did have a recording setup like that I'd expect it to work better with float samples.
jrajav 4y ago
You're absolutely right insofar as you're speaking about static audio that's already been produced and finished - there is almost no point in storing anything above 24-bit integer as far as dynamic range even for archival purposes. However, there is a legitimate purpose behind having higher dynamic range for production purposes and sample sources. There are some recording sources that can actually produce 32-bit audio. Plus, you might want to do some processing on the sound that would end up affecting the dynamic range, or otherwise benefit from the increased resolution. One example is nonlinear processing that generates new musical information from the original signal - you can of course just reduce the gain after processing, but you are then sacrificing some of the resolution of the new combined signal, which itself could otherwise be used by further downstream processes. This all happens post-recording, but can still be musically important before getting to the finished product. This is why DAWs work in 32-bit or 64-bit processing internally, and why many high-quality sample libraries will come in 32-bit, especially smaller one-shots. I often convert samples to .flac for space reasons, and have to either skip 32-bit .wavs or downsample them to 24.
- klodolph 4y ago
  > However, there is a legitimate purpose behind having higher dynamic range for production purposes and sample sources. This is the justification for 24-bit audio... is there a reason why 24 bits is not enough here? If you're capturing audio sources directly, you'd use something like a 24-bit ADC, which you can find easily enough. The "raw" output of the ADC is 24 bits. If you're doing intermediate processing in your DAW, then the DAW is using single-precision floats (or possibly double), which cannot be losslessly converted either to 32 bit or 24 bit integers, so how would you choose the right format to store? It seems to me that you'd either store the original floating-point data, or you'd perform some kind of lossy conversion to a high-quality archival format... but if you do that, isn't 24 bits good enough? You're quantizing either way, and at 24 bits, you can have plenty of headroom and noise floor at the same time. Loads, even.
  - jrajav 4y ago
    There are two justifications, one, for recording - 24-bit is the standard in the studio yes (and more than you need for that context indeed), but 32-bit is more and more the standard for field recordings where the hardware is capable of it and it provides genuine utility, where you often have extremely soft and subtle sounds captured that you want to increase in gain to a more useful level. Also, once inside the digital world, there are many processes you can perform that add new musical information to the original sound that might be higher in gain but that you want to preserve for downstream processing until you're ready to actually "print" and quantize the final product, at which point, yes, 24-bit will be more than enough.
dsr_ 4y ago
Note that 144dB range is what you get from 24 bits per sample. 32 bits gets you another 48dB more. Some of your ADC/DAC chain can reasonably claim 125dB range. Some amplifiers can claim 17 or even 18 bits above their noise floor - 108dB. No full-spectrum microphones, headphones or speakers can reasonably claim 125dB without distortion, but if they did you would still want to limit your exposure to "never". Long-term damage begins with long-term exposure under 96dB.
- klodolph 4y ago
  People will use microphones to record audio like gunshots and explosions for use as sound effects. The humble snare drum will produce loads of dBs too, and is usually close-miked. You then take the same microphone and use it to record something much quieter. You end up with microphones that definitely do reasonably claim >125 dB range. The TLM102 claims something like 130 dB. How much you care about distortion will depend on the situation. My thought is that it would be very hard to get that 130 dB range all the way from an audio source to your ADC, and it would be very hard to get it back out all the way to speakers again.
  - retcore 4y ago
    >The TLM102 claims something like 130 dB. How much you care about distortion will depend on the situation. Neumann makes no such claims. They do claim max spl of 144 dB. But the TLM and is 10 dB less and this is prior to ADC of variable ability. Distortion isn't a ceteris paribus value for signal to noise calculations.
    - klodolph 4y ago
      https://en-de.neumann.com/tlm-102 https://en-de.neumann.com/tlm-102 > Due to its enormous dynamic range of 132 dB [...] Not really interested in dissecting what this means, or how to reconcile it with the SNR numbers. Just saying that Neumann does, in fact, make this claim. Not sure what point you're making about distortion.
- retcore 4y ago
radiowave 4y ago
In audio production, the relevance of 32 bit audio is that it's using the same 32 bit float representation of the audio that most of the signal processing stages are also using. In contrast, when people talk about 16 or 24 bit audio, they are customarily referring to an integer representation. In principle, every time you convert from the 32 bit float back to 24 bit integer, there's an opportunity for a careless human to screw up the scaling, and throw away some of the available integer range. Rinse and repeat until you have an audible problem. So this forms the basis for an argument in favour of keeping the audio in a float representation for as much of the production process as can reasonably be achieved. I don't see any benefit in 32 bit representation for delivery of the finished content, but I suppose that if, as part of the production process, you're transferring the audio online between different sites/people/whatever, then having lossless compression that works without having to convert back to integer might be useful. EDIT: Just read the thing more carefully, and realised that it's specifically talking about 32 bit int, NOT float. So right now, I can't see much practical use for this.

babypuncher 4y ago

I don't know that 32-bit audio is exactly common. As far as human hearing goes, 24-bit is already overkill. Even 16-bit should be an imperceptible downgrade for anything with a naturally low dynamic range (i.e. most music).