Triggaaar;165125 Wrote: > Ignoring SNR, what is confusing me particularly, is how according to the > statements I've quoted, reducing the volume to a certain point will not > result in losing original information if using a 24 bit DAC, but it > will if using an external 20 bit DAC. The volume control settings are carefully chosen so that with a 16 bit original no bits lower than the 24th one will be changed. The normal approach with a 16 bit original represented as a 24 bit signal, would be to make the bottom 8 bits 0s - so using the volume control, some of those bits may be turned in 1s, but no 1s will ever be required lower than the 24th bit. If you then throw away the bottom 4 of those 24 bits, you may be throwing away some 1s, and therefore some information. If you use all of the 24 bits you aren't throwing away any information.
It may be helpful to think of SNR as an 'analogue' thing and information as a 'digital' thing. The digital signal in this case is a representation of an analogue signal, and how you represent it digitally has an implication on the maximum SNR attainable in the analogue domain. In the digital domain you can represent and manipulate the signal in all kinds of different ways, but so long as you don't discard any bits, you retain all the information and you can still get back to the original digital signal. -- Patrick Dixon www.at-tunes.co.uk ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Patrick Dixon's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=90 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=30916 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
