opaqueice;289120 Wrote: > I already did: you didn't enjoy your breakfast that morning. > > It's very, very simple - if you take a 24 bit binary number and divide > it by some factor, the error you make will be in the "25th" bit (if you > round properly). If you truncate rather than rounding, the error may be > in the 24th bit, but that's as bad as it can possibly be. So the error > - I'm talking about the absolute error, *NOT* the error as a percentage > of the signal - is never larger than 000000000000000000000001. > > So all we have to ask is whether 000000000000000000000001 is ever > audible on a stereo system. It has the best chance with the analogue > gain maxed and with a frequency in the good part of the human hearing > range, but as I've shown it remains waaaaay below the threshold of > audibility even then. We might also want to ask whether (say) > 010000110000000000000001 is audibly different from > 010000110000000000000001 + 000000000000000000000001. It's not - it's > -harder- to hear small changes in level than it is to hear the change > alone (because of masking), and in any case my argument proves that it > would be *physically impossible* to hear that change either in > isolation OR added to another signal. > > You are probably confusing S/N - which will be much lower than 144dB in > these cases, since the original data was 16 bit - with audibility of the > distortion caused by rounding. Let me try to clarify that for you. > > Here are two ways in which distortion can be *inaudible*: > > 1) The S/N is sufficiently high that you do not hear the > noise/distortion no matter how loud the volume is, because the signal > always masks the distortion. That is one case where we don't have to > worry about distortion. A good example of that is the noise floor of a > decent digital audio system while playing music. > > 2) The maximum possible level of the noise/distortion is too low to be > audible *even when it's played without the signal*! In this case it > will *never* be audible - even when the S/N ratio is *0*. There are > *no exceptions*, and that's what I've shown is the case of a rounding > error in 24 bit audio. Of course if you had -infinite analogue gain- > available to you, you could always turn it up to the point that it > would be audible - but you don't.
You are still thinking in your own paradigm. I'm sure they must have taught you at Professor-school, to always question your own assumptions? -- 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=45736 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
