Down sampling from 24 bit 48k to 16/44

[John Pisciotta]

Whats the best way to drop mixes form 24 to 16?
thanks in advance,

[minister]

the worst way to shorten sample wordlength from 24 bits to 16 bits is to "truncate" or simply lop off 8 bits. you will get quantizing errors and the audio will sound "harder". the best way is to "dither", which, crudely stated, adds noise to the system which linearizes the requantizing and attaches the this noise to the LSB, or Least Significant Bit, which is then tossed away.

i believe that Pro Tools uses the TPDF, or Trangular Proabability Distribution Function. this is quite good for most applications.

you can choose other types of dithering, like POWr dither which is quite, good, popular and comes with your systems. there are three "types" of dither in this little plug-in. use your ears to determine which sounds best to you. (as to whethere or not this is Gaussian dither schemes, i do not know).

you can also use POWr dither in PEAK -- which i believe is defaulted to type 2.

the SONY LIMITER also has TPDF and 4 other dither types, with and without various amounts of NOISE SHAPING. these are all quite good. but beware, NOISE SHAPE only ONCE, and at the end. multiple dither w/o noise shaping is cool.

the TWEAKEHEAD SRC in PT is quite good. the new PEAK 5 SRC is much improved. I still prefer BARBABATCH for SRC from whatever (48, in your case) to 44.1. the dither in Barbabatch is not as nice as POWr. but theh SRC in Barbabatch is superior to any other software solution.

this is on a MAC.

hope that helps..

[Craig F]

being an ass today:

print to ATR102 w/ 1" mod at 15ips

re-digitize a desired settings