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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
by 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.
- duped 4y agoA microphone, preamp, and ADC that have > 144dB of dynamic range are extraordinarily rare outside of lab equipment. Physically, you are talking about signals measured in the tens of nano-volts (or nano-amps, depending on the mechanism of the microphone).
- jrajav 4y agoThe latest Zoom field recorders support 32-bit float recording and achieve a wider dynamic range than that (upwards of 210db) by having a circuit with two different ADCs. Also, it's less about the absolute resolution, and more about the ability to boost the gain, often by a lot, while still having a wide and useful dynamic range after the fact.
- duped 4y agoColor me skeptical, that's a wider dynamic range than air
- batmanturkey 4y ago32bit FLOAT is 24 bits of audio data, and has the unique advantage of being the typical internal processing format of plugins and audio workstations, due to the desire for headroom while processing to avoid artifacts from overflows of various kinds, among other things. (Upsampling is also common before performing calculations that may alias or mirror.) The stacked ADC approach does allow for a wider overall dynamic range, but I would be skeptical of the physical transducers capabilities in using it all, but the 32-but float format here appears to be largely about lossless transfer to a DAW such that further processing is lossless, as we are not converting from int to float and back. This format could then be said to be useful as a master media format. The article in the OP is about a flac containing a 32-bit int audio stream, however, which appears less useful and not at all related to 32-bit float