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Originally posted by Synchronicity There must be a huge difference in dynamic range going from 16 bit to 24 then. I work at 24..

Probably not super noticalble.

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Originally posted by Synchronicity Wahey! Most Significant Bits, I just learnt that on Tuesday! We just briefly talked about it, we set up an oscilloscope between two computers and transferred/read ascii characters through the oscilloscope. It was quite cool to see actually. So with the 32 bit floating point.. since my card supports a maximum depth of 24 does that mean I can't work at the 32 bfp depth?

The 32-bit is a floating point in software. your sequencer dithers back down to 24 bit before making output. The higher floating point helps out complex calculations. Think of it as more decimal places in a number.

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Originally posted by Synchronicity So with the 32 bit floating point.. since my card supports a maximum depth of 24 does that mean I can't work at the 32 bfp depth?

It's just how the software operates. It has nothing to do with your soundcard. The only thing where the bit depth of your soundcard matters is with playback and recording. You can process and render 24-bit audio even if you only have a 16-bit card, if I'm not mistaken.

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Originally posted by CReddick Probably not super noticalble. The 32-bit is a floating point in software. your sequencer dithers back down to 24 bit before making output. The higher floating point helps out complex calculations. Think of it as more decimal places in a number.

Right. Again that was mentioned at Uni - I usually need to go over these things for them to sink in.

So is 32 bfp much more cpu intensive?

Mmn. I didn't really need to ask that, I've set it up and there's no difference.

I guess a better question is are there any disadvantages to it?

I think every sequencer works with 32-bit floating point internally. The setting you're messing around with is probably a recording setting; when you record you can choose what bit depth you want to record it in and no, there's no real disadvantage to a 32-bit recording except for bandwidth. If you're streaming a bunch of files off a disk, you have to read more bytes at a time if they're 32-bit, which means you can't play back as many at once (someone actually posted about a disk bandwidth problem a few weeks ago).

If you don't do a lot of recording, sampling, etc., then it probably won't make much difference.

If your sequencer is actually letting you change the bit depth of its internal processing then that seems like a bit of a WTF to me... 32 bits is the actual number of bits in a single-precision floating point number on a PC so it would be pretty hard to go below that. Easy to go above, though, to a double (64) or extended (80). Wasteful, though, since the hardware doesn't support more than 24 bits and 32 bits is plenty enough to avoid any rounding errors.

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quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut I think every sequencer works with 32-bit floating point internally. The setting you're messing around with is probably a recording setting; when you record you can choose what bit depth you want to record it in and no, there's no real disadvantage to a 32-bit recording except for bandwidth. If you're streaming a bunch of files off a disk, you have to read more bytes at a time if they're 32-bit, which means you can't play back as many at once (someone actually posted about a disk bandwidth problem a few weeks ago). If you don't do a lot of recording, sampling, etc., then it probably won't make much difference. If your sequencer is actually letting you change the bit depth of its internal processing then that seems like a bit of a WTF to me... 32 bits is the actual number of bits in a single-precision floating point number on a PC so it would be pretty hard to go below that. Easy to go above, though, to a double (64) or extended (80). Wasteful, though, since the hardware doesn't support more than 24 bits and 32 bits is plenty enough to avoid any rounding errors.

Yeah actually I'm using SX3 and it's the record format I've changed.

What you've just said leads me to loads of other questions but I'll just let this info sink in for now!

Cheers.