🚀 go-pugleaf

      Bit depth. Yeah, what he said.




Now I'm confused - is Eric agreeing or disagreeing? As far as I'm concerned, bit depth is the one that makes a significant difference, not bit rate, where differences only become audible through bad design of brickwall filters.

At any sample rate that covers the entire audio band (ie 44.1k and up), recording at 24-bit depth (which is what you are actually doing) will, on a good system, leave you listening to the differences in the analog components around the A-D and D-A converters rather than the digital sound.

And it has to be said that some systems are better than others from this point of view. There seems to be a growing consensus that at present, the best-sounding system around that's affordable (there are others as good that are not affordable by mere mortals!) is E-Mu's 1820m system. I was somewhat surprised to find that my Echo Mia (no slouch at all) sounds noticeably 'different' to the E-Mu - more so than I would have credited, in fact, in a direct comparison. And this is simply down to the way the analog output is handled - because this is the only real difference between them. And that's with 32-bit (actually 24-bit) signals fed to them. The difference between them with 16-bit signals is pretty insignificant.