16 vs 24 bits and why Live needs better metering.

Jan Holm · Post by **Jan Holm** » Wed May 24, 2006 3:57 pm

I've seen some 24 bits bashers in here. I did a little article
for you, among others. What differs here from what I have
seen before is that I include sound samples to show the
problems. Sound says more than 1000 words, or sumptin.

http://www.sphion.com/bits.htm

Sound quality is a big matter for me, 16bits and the
metering in Live is a really bad match !!!! Really hope V6
does somehing about the metering.

siddhu · Post by **siddhu** » Wed May 24, 2006 4:15 pm

Just curious as to who would bash 24bit recording and mixing when it's a known fact that it gives you much better sound, headroom, etc.

There must be some truly uneducated people out there! The same ones that beleive that there's no link between smoking and cancer and global warming is a myth.

eyeknow · Post by **eyeknow** » Wed May 24, 2006 9:20 pm

see sound on sound may issue. gives some math about the subject. 24 rules

DeadlyKungFu · Post by **DeadlyKungFu** » Wed May 24, 2006 10:04 pm

doesn't matter, Live uses some sort of dynamic bit allocation to handle dynamic range, so the usual rules of bit depth vs. SNR etc. don't apply here.

I render in 17 bits so my shit goes up to eleven and I put grease on my soundcard jacks to lower the distortion. The wooden knobs on my soundcard really warm the tone up too.

eyeknow · Post by **eyeknow** » Wed May 24, 2006 11:03 pm

bensuthers · Post by **bensuthers** » Wed May 24, 2006 11:18 pm

> 16bits and the
> metering in Live is a really bad match !!!! Really hope V6
> does somehing about the metering.

well put live into 24 bit's. It's in the preferences. as for metering, they do exactly what I need them to do - tell me there's signal, tell me when the RMS is ~-6db, and tell me when it's clipping. Anything more is the domain of my ears.

(and if you need more, chances are you need it because you're fiddling with some dynamic plugin, and the plugin writers have realised you want a particular style of metering and have given it to you)

leisuremuffin · Post by **leisuremuffin** » Thu May 25, 2006 1:32 am

Uhhh, but you can do 24bit in live if you want to.

and what exactly would anyone do with better meters? I've always wondered. Not that i'm opposed to nicer looking meters, but i can't see any work reason for wanting them.

oh, i guess ben beat me to both of my points.

.lm.

eyeknow · Post by **eyeknow** » Thu May 25, 2006 5:26 am

Well, if talking about recording audio, and you are not mixing with sends (another situation entirely) live will hold it's own to logic/protools (le/mpowered)

I get beautiful reproduction, and you can play with 24 bit allot more. For example.......we all LOVE bass right? You can get more of the rumbly lows (40-60hz) and booooooost it. Or at least much more than 16bit.....

There's math behind that

Jan Holm · Post by **Jan Holm** » Thu May 25, 2006 10:29 am

Oh, sorry I actually meant something else than "better looking meters"
Looks does matter with certain stuff, the nice simple GUI of Live is what
makes me very productive and fast.

I meant more precise metering. The meter itself for me could be
a 3 state meter, on, off, clipping. What I really could use is a
peak and hold meter readout. When I rendeer I want to peak at
-0.0001 to get the most quality. Doing that in live now, you have
to rely on metering plugs which kinda sucks. Having peak and hold
readout makes it very simple and fast to adjust the volume of the
track /master.

ciw · Post by **ciw** » Thu May 25, 2006 12:46 pm

24 bits is all very well but for those of us with slower computers, what's the performance hit?

for example with 16 bits, one MMX instruction (the way multimedia maths gets done on an intel chip) will handle 4 samples of audio. with 24 bits, i'm guessing it will only handle 2 samples per instruction - unless the optimizer is very clever - I don't really know much about this stuff

hypothetically that's a 50% performance hit. I don't have a clue what it is in real life... does anyone here know?

Michael-SW · Post by **Michael-SW** » Thu May 25, 2006 12:52 pm

There will be some increase in disc access (and storage space obviously) with 24 bits, but there shouldn't be any increase in CPU usage. Live converts all incoming audio to 32 bit floating point anyway, regardless if it is 16 or 24 bits.

So, once inside the Live engine it won't matter at all, CPU wise. Higher sampling rate on the other hand (48 kHz, 96 kHz etc) will linearly increase CPU use.

ciw · Post by **ciw** » Thu May 25, 2006 1:08 pm

Great answer, thankyou.

djsynchro · Post by **djsynchro** » Thu May 25, 2006 1:29 pm

If you want the highest quality you should render in 32 bits and take that to the mastering plant or dither it down yourself with noise-shaping to 16 bits in something like Sound Forge.

If you do that you can safely keep a couple of dbs under 0db.

Now a LO-FI comment: That pad sound recorded at -60/16 bit then normalised back up again sounds fantastic! especially the parts where there's just a couple of bits left and it starts sounding "zippered". I'm going to experiment with that see if I can get some good sounds. I know we have Redux but who knows this might be different.

Angstrom · Post by **Angstrom** » Thu May 25, 2006 1:59 pm

you only need to render to 24 bit.

24 bit wav is equivalent to 32 bit float.

wav is an integer format, Live is 32 bit float for processing, the reasons for the odd looking correlation between float and int are dull dull dull. but anyway 32 bit float is equivalent to 24 bit int.

unless I have misunderstood something very crucial - which happens a lot

Jan Holm · Post by **Jan Holm** » Thu May 25, 2006 2:35 pm

djsynchro wrote: Now a LO-FI comment: That pad sound recorded at -60/16 bit then normalised back up again sounds fantastic! especially the parts where there's just a couple of bits left and it starts sounding "zippered".

Hehe, I was thinking the same thing. As an effect thing its sounds amasing.
Havent heard bit reducers able to something that crunchy. Cant remember
the exact numer, but as far as I remember, if i bounced to -80 the at 16bit
the file was empty !!!