Phil Leigh;577776 Wrote: > No I'm not saying that. It's easy enough for you to try it and see. Get > a true "24-bit" recording from somewhere and convert it to 16-bit in > Audacity. > > Do they now sound the same? > > Do this with classical music with quiet passages. Rock music generally > won't really show any differences. > > > > The Stereophile article (which I haven't read) was I thought talking > about the effective resolution of the Touch analogue output maxing out > at 18 bits? > That would imply the noise floor of the analogue stage wipes out the > bottom six bits. All I'm saying is I don't think that matters very > much. This is all about noise floor, not granularity of resolution. In > practice no-one could get to hear the bottom 6 bits anyway, regardless > of what is in them. > Sure, the noise floor of the Touch is higher than that of my DAC. But > when the music is playing, I can't hear that noise...
Phil I absolutely agree that 24 bit playback does sound better than 16 bit playback of a 24 bit file. Perhaps we have been talking at cross purposes. I assume that the reason why 24 bit files sound better is because there is information beyond the 16 bits which can make a perceptible difference. Like you i do not believe that this lies in the ability to distinguish sounds which sit below the range in which a microphone can pick them up. It is my assumtion that it is the ability to distinguish between bits 16-20 or so at levels above recoding noise floor which means that each sample is effectively more detailed. (lets call this change sensitivity -I assume that this is what you meant by granularity). It is my assumtion that this ability is somewhat limited in any DAc ie that most 24 bit DACs cannot resolve the last few bits of the message (as opposed to the noise floor) . In this case the change sensitivity of a 24 bit dac would be less than 24 bit. I also assumed that the term resolution applied to that change sensitivity as well as to the measure of the minimum amplitude of sound (in overall level) which could be picked up (say minimum level sensitivity ). So does the stereophile measurement measure the change sensitivity or only the minimum level sensitivity. If not is there a way of measuring the change sensitivity? I had assume that the measurement meant that effectively every 24 bit word was read by the touch as x....x0000000 whereas a transporter read the words as x......xxxx0000 Or am I just barking up the wrong tree. I am not tryign to be awkward i have genuinely been confused for ages about why 24 bit audio sounds better, what the difference is between various dacs, and what John Atkinson's resolution measurement means. -- adamdea ------------------------------------------------------------------------ adamdea's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=37603 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82050 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
