Anyway, my main point is that you may want to run at 24-bit for two main reasons: (1) headroom, and (2) archiving for possible future use. That's my two cents...
just out of curiousity why not also do 48 or higher sample rate for the future if you have the capabilities now?
Well, I could run 96 with the R4 and have at times since I bought it. My basic answer is that I'm pretty much totally ok with 16/44 from a listening standpoint, so anything else is kind of excessive. I'm sure a whole bunch of people would disagree, but hey, to each his own. On the 96 front, frankly, I just don't like dealing with the freakin' HUGE file sizes and the splits -- it's just a headache I don't want to deal with from needing twice the HD space, running slower processing (I master almost everything I tape a little), splicing together splits (YUK!), and that extra step of resampling with anti-aliasing. Maybe I should care more, but I kind of don't. On the 48 front, I'm more torn. The file size and processing time (when mixing and using vst's and whatnot) aren't as much of a factor, but that added step of resampling still is. I basically just don't think it makes much of a difference to me, so I started running 44.1 again. I go back and forth on that, and I probably should just run 48. See, I'm pretty much happy with 16/44 audio, but the 24-bit thing has some real advantages like I raised before. ALTHOUGH I left out another HUGE advantage of 24-bit... The increased accuracy is very helpful in lowering quantization errors when doing any sort of processing like mixing a matrix, doing a bass rolloff, EQ'ing, fades, or (god forbid) some compression. So, 24-bit has some really obvious benefits to me on that front even when 16-bit is your target medium (between the headroom and quantization improvements, it's worth it right there). On the sampling rate front however, the advantages just don't seem to be as compelling to me, but maybe my ears are just shot?
Topic: 24 bit vs 16 bit (Read 6821 times)