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Rakesh Malik wrote:Mattias Murhagen wrote:Bit depth is about SNR.
No, it's not.
Yes it is.
Rakesh Malik wrote:The SNR is electronic. It comes from the preamps, and has nothing to do with the bit depth of the recording;
Just because you have a SNR for electronic devices doesn't mean you don't have it with a converted signal.
Rakesh Malik wrote:the bit depth determines how many steps you have on your ladder, the noise floor is how much of the ladder you plunked in the water. The height of the ladder depends on its height, not on how many steps it has.
You can't both have an increased SNR of 144dB versus 96dB going from 16 to 24 bits AND not have that be about SNR. Choose one.
The quantization error is noise. More bits = the LSB error being further down, i.e. higher SNR.
Rakesh Malik wrote:The log vs linear thing is similar. In a "linear" ladder every step represents an incrementally higher value. In a logarithmic scale the steps of the ladder are the log of the value they're encoding. So to represent a step whose value is 1,000,000,000 you'd use (in a log base 10) 9 -- 9 zeroes, i.e. it's 1 * 10 raised to the 9th power. The log of that is 9. (It's very simple with evenly divisible numbers, chosen because they're easier to understand.)
In sound 6 dB represents twice the loudness. So the first six steps represent, say, numbers from 1-2. The next six represent 2-4. Then 4-8. Then 8-16.
See Dan's reply.