Is recording at high bit depth objectively better?

[adamdea]

On 10/8/2020 at 1:59 AM, Rexp said:

I've been recording some stuff using Audacity, it sounds better at 24 and 32bit than 16bit (sample rate 44.1 in all cases). Now I'm a believer that Redbook should be enough, however I'm not sure modern ADC's are capable of capturing accurately at 16bit. Some Objectivist members like @Archimago record at 24bit so the question is, is 16bit good enough? (forget studio requirement for extra processing bandwidth) 

ADCs are not the limitation. The limitation is in the mics, ambient noise floor and your ears. But there is no point recording editing etc at 16 bits. The ADC will almost certainly be sigma delta so there is nothing native about the 16 bits or even 24: any form of PCM will be the result of a conversion, and you might as well make that 24 or 32 bits in the first instance.

16 bits is not enough for editing.  To take a trival example, you will want to have some headroom in the recording, which you will then reduce to make the peak at or near full scale: if you started out at 16 bits you would immediately lose valuable DR.

As for the final distribution format, 16 bits is fine.

[adamdea]

2 hours ago, Rexp said:

I am not doing any editing, just recording analog tapes or single voice. 16/44.1 sounds bad, 24/44.1 sounds good. I previousy used a USB audio interface which made all my recordings sound bad so figured the ADC and bit depth were key. 

The ADC itself should not be any different if you are using the same device. It is possible that it's making a mess of the conversion from the ADC itelf to 16/44 (possibly by not dithering?) but it seems odd. Have you tried converting one of your 24/44 files to 16/44 using the HQ settings in audacity or dbpoweramp using triangular pdf dither? if so do they sound very different? Either way I guess it doesn't really matter provided that your 24/44 recordings sound good to you.