Topic: DPA 4061>Edirol R-09, 24/48 or 16/44.1

[hobbes4444]

OK.  First the facts:

I have a new Edirol R-09 with a 4 Gb Transcend SD card.  DPA 4061s (HEB) been in use for a while.    I have a sluggish Pentium 3 PC with Audacity.  I plan to seed some masters and analog transfers via BT.  So, the question I have is whether I should record masters in 24/48 or 16/44.1. 

The reason for the q is multi-fold:
I'm new to PC transfers as everything prior has been via Marantz standalone. 
My PC has only 512 mb of RAM (maxed out) and a 1.5 Ghz processor (somewhat slow for today's standards)
I'm not sure if Audacity will convert 24 bit masters, and if so, how well my computer will deal with this (not interested in investing a lot of money in a software program that will deal with this process).  And I'm also not sure if Audacity handles files larger than 2Gb (seems to be a common issue).
I'm not sure whether it will really make that much of a difference for field recordings with mid-level equipment.
I don't plan on seeding 24 bit recordings

Ultimately, it just seems simpler to record at 16/44.1.

Comments welcome. . .

Thanks,
Dave

[dorrcoq]

I'm not an expert, but is seems to me if you aren't going to seed the shows at 24 bit then you are jsut wasting your efforts recording them that way.  Once you downsample and dither them down to 16 bit I would expect they would be similar quality to what you would have had by recording at 16 bit.

Feel free to correct me   I would like to learn more about this, too.

[drewloo]

One thing that recording at 24-bit allows you to do is use whatever dither algorhythm you like best.  If you don't access to nice algorhythms like MegabitMax or UV22HR it probably won't benefit you much if you don't have 24-bit playback capabilities.

[Gutbucket]

Many record 24bit so that they can set levels to max out lower and not have to worry about adjusting levels so much to avoid clipping during recording, even if they plan on listening or trading 16bit files.   The files can be normalized and converted to 16 bit in Audacity. I don't have much Audacity experience but I've done that much with it. It's best done with dither to preserve resolution in the quiet parts (not sure if Audacity has a dither option or not), but even if the conversion just truncates the bottom bits and you'll still be better off than recording at 16bit.  In that case Audacity would just throw away the bottom 8 bits of each 24bit word. If you normalize before converting to maximize the dynamic range that makes it through to the 16 bit file you probably won't loose much off the bottom. That's not downsampling though..

I believe you can downsample in Audacity too, but I haven't tried that yet.  That would to convert from a higher sampling rate such as 48khz to 44.1khz for CD burning.  This is computationally more work than adjusting word length (24 to 16 bit).  I haven't done that yet in Audacity.  I just record at 24/44.1 on the R-09.

Hope that helps.

[Gutbucket]

Just checked and Audacity will dither.  I don't know what the quality is like, but there is a low quality for realtime playback and a high quality for saving files.

[ghellquist]

My two cents.

-- If the end media is CD, do record at 44.1 instead of 48. The quality difference, if there is any, is small and not worth the hassle.
-- Do record at 24 bits. Set levels so that you are sure to never clip your recording equipment during songs. Leave ample room up there, aim for peaks at maybe -10dB. When at home, postprocess by increasing levels, normalizing is one way.
-- Do check out other programs. I like Samplitude a lot, check out the new SE version that is 49 euro (well below USD 100). This gives you a lot of functions and allows you to put a good limiter on the sound (increasing levels), burn CD-s, work with large files, dither in different ways and so on. All with a professional quality sound engine.

Well, my two cent.

Gunnar