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 Post subject: 24 bit audio path
PostPosted: Mon Apr 09, 2018 11:33 pm 

Joined: Tue Mar 10, 2015 9:03 pm
Posts: 227
Location: Utah, USA
Leif recently upgraded Breakaway One (I know this is Stereo Tool's forum... please bear with me) to enable a fully 24 bit audio path. This is great, I think, if nothing else than for future capability. In reality, the availability of 24 bit audio is fairly scarce. I think major studios/labels are producing and distributing more and more 24 bit tracks. But I would say over 98% of the available digital music is strictly 16 bit. Given the above (if correct), setting my audio path to 24 bit will likely make little to no difference.

My question is this... What if I start to re-rip my music collection from CD at 24 bit WAV or FLAC? The files will be in a 24 bit format but the audio, ultimately, will still be 16 bit. Would I be actually hurting the music quality doing this? Would I really not be benefiting at all?

Would I damage the music by ripping 16 bit audio to a 24 bit format?

Am I future-proofing here? Does anyone have any insider info to studios/labels producing more 24 bit audio?

Does Stereo Tool Support a 24 bit audio path?

Thanks!

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 Post subject: Re: 24 bit audio path
PostPosted: Tue Apr 10, 2018 2:18 am 
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Joined: Tue Mar 17, 2009 2:56 pm
Posts: 4151
I think ST supports 24bit already.

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 Post subject: Re: 24 bit audio path
PostPosted: Tue Apr 10, 2018 8:54 am 
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Joined: Tue Sep 15, 2015 12:22 pm
Posts: 362
Stereo Tool uses 32 bit floating point internally, so 24 bit is not a problem. I guess re-ripping won't hurt your music, but you won't gain anything by doing so either (it's the same as converting an MP3 to a WAVE file, it works, but you won't gain a thing). Note that Stereo Tool has a feature called 'dequantizer' though, which upscales to "more bits" of audio. For 16 bit input you won't hear that much of a difference, unless you're playing tracks with really low levels (like classical music).

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 Post subject: Re: 24 bit audio path
PostPosted: Tue Apr 10, 2018 5:28 pm 

Joined: Tue Mar 10, 2015 9:03 pm
Posts: 227
Location: Utah, USA
Thanks guys for the details. Do you guys happen to know about the old HDCD technology that was on some CDs back in the day? I understand it is squeezing more bits into the 16 bit framework, but it was kinda meh altogether. I see there's a plugin for Foobar2000 and it can decode and extract the HDCD data when ripping a CD. But I suppose that's still ultimately 16 bits of data, regardless.

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