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Comment by rowe_morehouse | Hacker News Reader

That sounds cool, right on.

But I don't really agree with those people who insist that 44.1/16bit is all you need.

I do all my audio work at 48k/32-bit float. There is a reason for this: it's to avoid clipping when you are doing destructive effects. With 32-bit you can spike above zero-db but still preserve the curve of the waveform, and bring that spike back down under zero-db before you render.

Not sure how this impacts your board or your use-case, but I wanted to point this out. It's probably overkill in your context.

I convert everything to 48k/32-bit, even when I am ripping from AAC video, converting mp3s, whatever.

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The overhead to do the conversions to and from your preferred format on the CPU isn't really significant enough to impact performance. And even on highest quality DACs, you're really only getting 22 bit integer precision out of the ADCs and into the DACs regardless of how the samples are represented. And on cheap ADCs and DACs, it's common to get only 10 or 12 bits of signal to noise ratio.

Totally agree though, that 16-bit isn't enough for guitar effects.

Thanks for your comment! Yes, there is a place for higher sample rates and bit depths - especially for authoring content and playback on high-end systems. As you mention, real-time effects can also benefit.

I could have worded what I said better; I don't think people are arguing it's never needed, just that on a small board like this (with limited space for more filtering, isolation, balanced inputs/outputs, etc), other factors can somewhat limit the usefulness of higher sample rates and bit depths. That said, the audio quality has been great for the things I've done with the board.

I don’t see how your 32bit float argument applies to codec specs, since you can only get a 24bit signed int from/to a codec. You’ll need a limiter to convert floats to ints either way, 24bit or not.

> I convert everything to 48k/32-bit, even when I am ripping from AAC video, converting mp3s, whatever.

Assuming the mp3 files originated from music CDs, isn't converting from 44.1k to 48k destructive?

Same. You can render out to 44.1/16 really well but it's not a good format to work in.

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