Just wanted to point out the obvious, which is often overlooked. When talking about digital audio resolution, we talk in terms of bit DEPTH. That's because the most signigicant bit always occupies the same "position", regardless of resolution. The best analogy is if one viewed all digital audio as a fractional value, that is less than 1. The most significant bit is always the 1/2 bit, the next bit to the right is the 1/4 bit, etc. Just as with a fractional number, where one can add more resolution to the right of the decimal without significantly changing the value. For instance, once could approximate pi as 3.14, or one could be more accurate: 3.14159265.
In theory, a 16 bit audio signal has an infinite number of implied 0 bits to the right of the LSB. So expanding 16 to 24 bits of resolution just causes 8 of the implied 0 bits to become explicit. To throw a little monkey wrench in things, remember that digital audio is SIGNED twos complement notation, so the left-most bit is actually the sign bit, and the most-significant bit is immediately to the right of it. In twos complement, if the sign bit is negative (1), the other bits are complemented as well. I hope this isn't too confusing... This becones more obvious if one ever has the chance to look at the video from a (now obsolete) 1630 or F1 format digital processor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two's_complement -- Timothy Stockman ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Timothy Stockman's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=8867 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=39611 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
