[splitdisk]

I'm very jealous of your healthy hearing range... I now wear hearing protection, but the damage has been done. When it comes to file storage, I will take a 44.1/48K 24 bit FLAC happily, since it usually comes out to the same size as a CD-Q WAV file anyways. I see no reason why everything shouldn't be in this format, but CD's have made a serious dent in formatting standards/habits.

[klodolph]

24bit has been shown to be excessive in actual tests, and it doesn't really pass the "bullshit test". 24 bit allows you to switch between a whisper in a library and a jet engine or shotgun blast in a single recording—yes, it would instantly damage your hearing.

By comparison, 16 bit audio can "only" record a whisper in a library and a motorcycle or jackhammer.

Double blind tests show that 8 bits are not enough, but 14 bits are.

[lmm]

Citation? The article is talking about dithering, which you really don't want to do, not least because the end result will probably compress worse than the higher-bit-depth version. The fact that they suggest it at all implies, to my mind at least, that 16 bits isn't enough.

[dTal]

You absolutely do want to do dithering. Dithering converts distortion (error correlated with the signal, which is bad) to noise (error uncorrelated with the signal, which is less bad). This means that even though the noise floor is higher, you can recover more of the original signal. There is virtually no case where that is not desirable.

You're right of course that it will compress less well, but that's to be expected because you've lost less information!

[lmm]

Or because you've added randomness?

Store the 24-bit signal, and you could do a dithered downsample to 16-bit on playback if you think that's a good idea. Wouldn't that be better all round?

[splitdisk]

It's my understanding that 24 bit audio can capture the quieter sounds in greater detail than 16 bit. So say if you EQ out a frequency range in order to "zoom in" on a much quieter range, like the motorcycle vs. whisper, you can hear the whisper in as much detail as a full CD quality recording.

For playback though, I agree that 14 bits are probably enough. Even high quality mastering tape has the equivalent of about 12 bits of dynamic range, which is fine. Many fabled analog pieces of equipment have terrible signal-noise characteristics, but are still valued for other reasons (coloration, distortion etc...)-which is all fine by me.