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Comment by kierenj | Hacker News Reader

Did you check out the article? 16 bits can cover the range very well, more than you (or anyone) could ever distinguish

Sigh. Please see my other reply. It isn't a matter of bit rate (indeed, 16 bits could be more than enough). It is a matter of how engineers serve the targeted markets of each format.

Perfectly valid point. It's not a technical limitation that "normal" recordings are spoiled by compression, but it's a commercial limitation (or whatever you call it) that has a very real impact.

You cannot buy good recordings in other formats, in this format you can. So there's a market - not a very big one as such, and maybe created for all the wrong reasons, but it is there.

I'm not sure how it's not even more "silly" then. Investing in additional infrastructure, equipment, and effort, when all you need to do is turn down the compressor ratio in the mix... Sounds silly to me.

Well, SACD at least offers one further advantage than lower compression: multichannel audio, which is a big deal for classical music, especially works involving spatialization. Investing in a SACD player is well worth if that repertoire concerns you.

> all you need to do is turn down the compressor ratio in the mix

The problem here is that the "you" in this sentence is not "me", or even an entity I can really influence, much less control.

It's not really even the audio engineer whose boss is telling him to turn up the volume so high that only the top few bits of the 16-bit recording are in use. The boss is saying this so that the song can be heard when the user turns the volume down because of the obnoxiously noisy commercials on the radio. Those commercials have found that they're more effective when they turn the volume way, way up. And they don't give a whit about the quality of their audio as long as they can sell more cars or tickets or whatever, much less the quality of the songs that play after them, much much less the quality of the songs that someone downloads to listen to offline in a nice listening environment without commercials.

The solution isn't just "turn down your compressor ratio", there's a big, hairy Nash equilibrium/politics problem that can be bypassed by offering 24/192 as a secondary product. If you want to remaster it to 16/48 after downloading, you're welcome to do so.

I'm an amateur at all this (and maybe the article stated this explicitly), I use Garageband. I find the main reason to do your recording and mastering in 24 bit is so you have room to change the level of each track without the sum of them clipping. When you are trying to set the levels of each track you have two constraints if you use 16 bit. The first is you need to keep all of them low enough that the overall recording doesn't clip but you also don;t want to over compensate and use only half the dynamic range available in 16 bit.

Doing this process in 24 bit gives you a large margin of error to play with. No real point to keeping that for the recording people are going to listen to

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