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edenmusic
32 Bit floating point audio
Apa sih 32 bit floating point audio? Mari di simak lebih original karena dalam bahasa Ingris....
The Theory
32 bit floating point audio files
have a theoretical dynamic range of up to around 1680 dB. Compare that with the
144 dB available from 24 bit recordings and you will realise that it’s quite an
improvement! In terms of resolution that’s a lot more than the human brain
could ever decipher. Add to that the fact that there is no audio interface
currently available that has Analog-to-Digital and Digital-to-Analog converters
that are anything but either 16 or 24 bit and you may begin to wonder - what’s
the point?
The Advantages
So having your 24 bit recordings in
32 bit floating point format will not change the quality of the initial
recordings themselves, but creating audio files in this format before they are
processed by plug-ins will help you avoid the following:
- Clipping
during AudioSuite rendering
- Unnecessary
noise introduced by AudioSuite dithering
- Rounding
errors during signal processing
These
issues then are mostly caused by the fact that with either 16 or 24 bit audio
the data requires conversion at the point of processing.
The Disadvantages
So, it is a ‘good thing’ from a
quality point of view to have your audio in the 32 bit floating point format
from the start, but is there a downside? 32 bit files are 50% bigger than their
24 bit counterparts, and 100% bigger than the 16 bit equivalent. For example,
60 seconds of 44.1 kHz mono 16 bit audio will take up roughly 5 MB of hard
drive space and require a data throughput of 83 kB/s. These figures will double
at 32 bit. Still not huge numbers by today’s standards maybe, but 10 minutes of
a 64 (mono) track session recorded at 32 bit and 192 kHz will take up roughly
28 GB and require data throughput of 48 MB/s just to play back.
