Recording in 44.1kHz, 48kHz or higher? 24bits or higher?

[MondoLikeMetal]

16bit has no "sound", it just has less headroom. No music sounds better at 16bit. This thread is becoming weird.

I haven't heard a shootout, but that's what was told to me by an instructor - I'll might do a little research on that if I end up tracking a punk/post punk band.
As for thewintersnow

My reasons for recording my demo's/tracks in 16-bit has less to do with computing power, although my 4 year old 3.0GHz AM3 Dual Core can barely track with 4 instances of X50v2 and Superior Drummer 2.0 with stock Andy Sneap Library, at any latency. I can however mix without much of a hitch. My main reason is that 24-bit audio takes up 50% more space than 16-bit. I am tight on disk space and can't afford to go out an buy a Hard Drive every time my current one gets full, it would be a nice luxury.

You could do what do, which is use two hard drives: one for storing your session and audio files, and the other strictly as a "mixing drive"
For instance, I have a fast 120G SSD that I have all my programs, libraries and samples on, (my C drive), and I bring in "X" session, and mix - then SAVE "X" session INTO NEW FOLDER down to my slow 500G Western Digital Drive, delete "X" session on the SSD, and bring up "Y" session and repeat the process, thus, faster read times, no orphaned files, and a clean C drive.

 

[Skaldir]

I don't know, but I don't think it's about the noise that people don't record in 16 bit.
It's more like that you only have 16 bit at fullscale. 6db under fullscale you only have 15 bits and so on. And when you don't track hot you have something like 12 bit. And somehwere under 12 bit I would guess you start hearing a degenarated signal, no?
Not recording in 24 bit because of disc space seems strange to me. You get some 1 TB harddrives for 60 €. You waste more money on other bullshit every week

 

[Terminus]

Feel like I'm taking an algebra test reading this thread.

 

[TheWinterSnow]

Feel like I'm taking an algebra test reading this thread.

Its a little more more complicated than algebra, its the high end of algebra and into entry level calculus. Don't let it get to you, most people never get that far in life ever. There are just some tweakers like me who have no life outside applied mathematics.

Its probably a good thing you don't know what's going on, it means you have a life.

 

[neptunian]

This is interesting: http://www.sounddevices.com/notes/recorders/real-world-24-bits/ -- some audio examples of how normalizing a signal that's 40dB down demonstrates audible differences between 16 and 24 bit.

Myself, I do notice the noise differences like with heavy limiting/compression on vocals (and maybe amp sims, haven't gone back to test that yet). So I record at 24 now. If hard drive space is a limitation then 24 bit is only a luxury.

 

[TheWinterSnow]

This is interesting: http://www.sounddevices.com/notes/recorders/real-world-24-bits/ -- some audio examples of how normalizing a signal that's 40dB down demonstrates audible differences between 16 and 24 bit.

Myself, I do notice the noise differences like with heavy limiting/compression on vocals (and maybe amp sims, haven't gone back to test that yet). So I record at 24 now. If hard drive space is a limitation then 24 bit is only a luxury.

That article does have good audio samples, and I do like that the author does say that sound quality has nothing to do with bit depth, but rather the quality of the analog gear both before an ADC and after a DAC.

One quick note though:

From my earlier post, I said noise at 16-bit can typically be around -70dBFS to -60dBFS, tracking levels of -40dBFS and normalizing it means you added 10dB+ more gain than a typical high gain guitar amp, and bringing your quantization noise and dithering noise up to -30dBFS to -20dBFS, which is I agree, extremely obvious.

40dB gain is a power gain of 10,000, which is pretty damn high. Who tracks with levels at -40dBFS anyway? That is a pretty extreme example.

Put it like this, I have never ever experienced noise anywhere close to what the 16-bit -40dB clips demonstrated, if I ever got noise like that hell yeah I would go to 24-bit.

 

[Uros]

I'm sure deLuther will come in here and deBunk that somehow in broken english with numbers and charts though.