Lavry Engineering Paper on Hi-Res

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Peter:

Thanks for the clarification. It does help. If you can provide some insights into a direction to measure what you are describing someone may be able to measure it. I think you are concerned that the averaging that pretty much all THD measuring systems use may be obscuring the actual errors/distortion you are describing. Keith Johnson has mentioned to me similar issues. Typically, if a measurement can be found that is useful and repeatable, soon enough there will be solutions. No manufacturer (especially chip vendors) wants to be caught with inadequate products. That's why there is a proliferation of 32 bit DAC's in a 24 bit world.

 

As Miska points out the ESS 32 bit ADC is really closer to 21 bits of information. I had thought we were closer to 22 bits by now.

 

However a transducer with anything past 10 bits of accuracy (.1% THD) measured this way would be quite remarkable. And even in an anechoic chamber you can't hear 120 dB dynamic range at one time.

 

We aren't even confronting the nature of the nonlinearity and what distortions/sidebands it creates. This can have a huge impact on its audibility, but this will turn into another digression, leading away from the bit depth discussion.