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Old 09-30-2010, 08:58 AM
Dism Dism is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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Default Re: Bouncing tracks quality loss.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kemo3ce View Post
I have another question, if u lose alot of fedelity going down to 16 bit then what's the point in recording in pro tools hd at 24 bit 192 kHz? If in the end ur loosing alot of the sound quality that u want? Sorry guys I'm new.
You don't really lose all that much fidelity in going from a higher samplerate to a lower one. In fact, most people wouldn't really be able to tell the difference between 192k and 96k, or even 44.1k for that matter. Not only that, but the disk space required for 192k wave files is borderline ridiculous.

Where you lose quality is in the bounce. Hence why dither is important. When you bounce from a higher bit depth/sample rate, there is data and detail being lost. Without dither, this lost detail becomes apparent, because you end up with aliasing and quantization error. Think of when you reduce a high quality image to a lower one. Without compensation, you end up with a grainy, pixelated looking image. Most photo-manipulation software will automatically compensate for this by applying dither. Dither is essentially "noise" that fills in the lost information and smooths out the image. The same goes for audio.

The next time you bounce a file from 96/24 to 44.1/16, put an instance of POWrdither on the master fader and see if there's a difference.
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