Is recording at high bit depth objectively better?

[pkane2001]

6 hours ago, Rexp said:

I don't know, I would like to know from Objectivists why they use 24/32bit for needle drops and are there any measurable differences versus 16bit.

 

There are measurable differences, mostly at the edge or well below of what is likely audible. But, if you want to be sure you have captured every crackle and pop in full glory (🤷‍♂️) then 24/48 or 24/96 is what I'd normally use. 32 bits instead of 24 doesn't make a difference. None of the existing ADCs or DACs have enough resolution/linearity to recover even the full 24 bits, much less 32.

[pkane2001]

39 minutes ago, Rexp said:

Thanks, with my recordings I don't find sample rates above 44.1 make a huge improvement but find 16bit has distortion that hurts my 'golden' ears in the same way most commercial Redbook stuff does. If I could measure this distortion, I could vet downloads prior to purchase. (I have wasted alot of money on unlistenable downloads) 

 

Don't know, I have found plenty of amazing-sounding 44.1/16 recordings, and plenty not so good. 

 

Make sure that you have dither applied when reproducing 16 bits, this helps with masking quantization noise. The difference between 16 and 24 bit should be really minor, unless you (or your DAC) are also applying some sort of DSP processing to the signal. In that case, it's better to keep everything in 24 bits to leave some room for loss of precision during calculations.

 

Take a 16 bit recording that sounds bad and convert it to 24 bits, then try to see if you can still hear the same problems. Could be something specific to how your DAC handles 16 bit data.

[pkane2001]

14 minutes ago, Rexp said:

Is there less quantization noise at 24bit?

 

Quantization noise is generated when converting between analog and digital or doing any kind of numerical calculations with precision down-conversions in a digital computer/DSP. Whatever precision the DAC is capturing, the quantization noise will be at the level of the least significant bit. For a 16 bit capture, it'll be down below -90dB. For 22 bit capture (about the best you could expect in a real DAC or ADC), it'll be down below -125dB. So, while you can certainly apply dither to a 24 bit file, it's really, really unlikely it'll improve anything audible.