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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

RE: Actually, 16 bit playback can sound just fine

There are separate arguments about bit rate and sample depth. It is best to discuss them one at a time. I am going to focus primarily on the bit depth issue here. I do not wish to debate what is or is not audible, just to clarify some misconceptions people may have on technical and economic matters.

1. The signal to noise ratio of 16 bit digital audio is approximately 91 dB, measured from peak levels. This comes from the necessity to add dither noise to eliminate gross distortion and noise modulation. Measuring from average levels, the signal to noise ratio is roughly 70 to 80 dB for recordings that have not been subjected to the "loudness wars".

2. Commonly used dither algorithms do not reduce quantization errors to independent noise. There is still higher order statistical correlation between the remaining quantization errors and the musical signal. Therefore the effect of additional bit depth is not just a lower noise floor.

3. Newer digital recordings made using PCM invariably capture 24 bits. Delivering all the bits that are available is not a question of "guilding the lily", it means delivering the music the way it was recorded.

4. The cost of 1 GB of hard drive storage is about $0.10. The cost of transmitting 1 GB of data across the Internet is about $0.10. The typical FLAC file for a 44/16 album takes up about 0.4 GB. The typical FLAC file for a 96/24 album takes up about 2 GB. In other words, the cost of the extra bits is hardly significant.

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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