Bit Depth Vs Sample Rate

What's more important? Bit depth or sample rate?

[LuxAudio]

Beng a poor and humble man makes you a gem friend💎

[MrChiefKakashi]

Oh, this was my question. Thank you for answering!

[homerjones]

Thanks - this was the one that really cleared up the bit/sample rate question for me.

[NosEL]

When I was very young, my dad could always turn the cable back on..as well as the electricity in the harder months. Having a gifted electrician in my life was a wonderful thing 😁 He loved tinkering with his stereo components as well

[thetruckmobilerecodingunit]

I once lived in an apartment complex where I had an outdoor closet I could lock and inside it we 2 Air conditioning units and 2 50 amp outlets, one for me and one for my neighbor. When I was injured and out of work and my power was shut off I built a 50 amp jumper cable and powered my apt off the next door circuit. The building would leave the power on in vacant units so they could cool them to show them to new renters, about once a month the manager would come inspect the unit checking to see if the Air Condition or a oven was left on, because they could see the bill on a vacant unit. They never suspected me of stealing the power, One guy moved in and then back out in 2 months when he got his first electric bill

[cau]

I would like to go to Paul'S school!

[KenTeel]

Putting into words, I'd say that bit depth represents possible slots for 1's and 0's. A slot (that is a bit) can have a 1 or a 0. This means that the more slots that you have (greater bit depth), the bigger the number, you can fit into those slots. Say you had only three slots (three bits), the lowest number that you could fit is 000, and the highest number is 111. The 111 in binary is equal to the number 7. If we increase the bit depth to 4 bits we could fit a bigger number into the available slots we could go from 0000 to 1111. The number 1111 in binary is equal to the number 15 in decimal. Looking at the three bits vs the four bits, we can see that with three bits, we could represent a half a sine wave with 7 possible numbers (or stair step voltage states.) With four bits, we could represent half a sine wave with 15 possible numbers, that would be shown as a stair step set of voltages. Having more slots, or as we say, greater bit depth, gives us more places to store numbers, and if each number represents a voltage level, with more slots we could have finer levels represented, because of the greater amount of unique numbers. Using our example, if we had three bits, we could have 7 stair steps in our half sine waves. If we had 4 bits, we wouldn't have any higher voltage represented than with the three bits, but we'd have smaller stair steps because we could divide the half sine wave into 15 different levels. So, the slots or bits represent possiblities for numbers, and the more slots that you have, the bigger the number you can have, and thus the finer the stair steps representing a half a sine wave. Where the sampling rate comes is in deciding just how many of these unique binary numbers we are going to use to represent a half a sine wave. Say that we have 8 bits or slots. If we only sample 5 times during a half a sine wave we'd have one sample at zero, one half way up the half sine wave, one at the top of the half sine wave, one half way down from the top of the half sine wave, and one back down at zero. Even though we had slots or bits enough for 256 possible stair steps, we didn't sample at a high enough sample rate to get that many stair step voltages to represent our half a sine wave. So because of our slow sample rate, our stair step voltages were huge, in comparison to what they could have been with a faster sample rate. In summary, slots are bits (bit depth.) Sampling rate is how many unique numbers you can stuff into these slots or bits. Now, I'm going by memory here, and that's always fallable. Someone correct me if I've screwed this up. This is a fun subject, Paul. Thanks !! (PS: for every bit that you add, that is for every potential slot that you add, you increase the resolution by 6 dB between bits. You don't get a higher maximum voltage by adding bits. You get finer stair steps by adding bits. This give you finer resolution, that is more unique number combinations to represent a half a sine wave, and thus clearer sound, up to a point. Also, because a half a sine wave is represented by stair steps, the more bits you have, and the greater the sampling rate to fill these bits with unique numbers, the stair step voltages can have more resolution at lower volume levels, that is voltage levels. This increased resolution gives you more dynamic range. More slots and unique samples to fill the slots, give you more dynamic range. Quantization errors are when the stair steps start to be "blockish" as you go lower and lower in volume, that is lower in voltage, to where there are few enough of these stair steps, that an analog signal can't be replicated accurately. This causes a type of distortion.)

[kam_uk]

Thank you for this video, you explained it so well..

[artyfhartie]

Sometimes when I listen to a Beethoven symphony, I worry about the bit depths and sample rate.

[subliminalvibes]

Bit Depth = Dynamic Range of volume

Sample Rate (divided by 2) = highest frequency you will capture during that recording.

[jonl]

I likely have this wrong, but I come from the visual image realm where I thought sample rate was similar to resolution, so it’s like the number of pixels in an image. Obviously the more pixels (dots) in a square inch makes for a more continuous looking image. The bit-depth pertains to how much information is held within each pixel - 8-bit can hold 256 colors, but 24-bit can do 16.7 million. So I thought similarly that sampling is the number of times a wave is sampled and bit-depth is the QUALITY of the sample, not just the dynamic range. If I have that totally wrong, I’d like to learn so I can hang my head in shame.

[christopherrohlf]

It's funny, some of the people teaching others about audio have the sound of the room they're in dominating the entire voiceover. Thanks for caring. What is your setup for recording the audio on these? Love the channel!

[steverogers]

I just love that Paul used to steal cable

[rollingtroll]

Paul; I digitize my vinyl records using a Tascam DA3000 in 24 bit, 192khz. If I record too quietly (which happened to me a few times), will I lose a part of this 24 bit advantage. If so, should I worry about it or is it negligible?
Also, DSD sounds great. The Tascam can record that too. It's way more airy and transparent than 24/192. Problem is; I record a vinyl record and then throw it in Adobe Audition to cut it into tracks, remove pops and clicks (manually) an get the levels correct between my various records. I then export it to 24/192 WAV and put it on my NAS to play it on my streamer. Is there a 'good' way of doing this with DSD recordings? I can of course convert them to 24/192 using Tascam's audio editor and I do notice that it'll still sound slightly better than 'normal' 24/192, but how much is left of this once I'm done editing?

[MrHamit]

Ah sorry Paul. I called you Tom in my SoundBlaster AE 9 comment. Now to this vid. Interesting. I too wandered because there some people that say CDDA is just perfect and why go HD cause you can't hear it anyways. Well I sorta can. What do I mean by sorta? I do hear and apreciate the difference in CDDA 44.1 KHZ 16 bits audio and full Blu-Ray 96 or 192 KHZ 24 bits audio. I even did some tessts with Sound Forge just making different files with all the bit depth and sample rates I could choose. So what I noted doing this is that yes sample rate gives you more air more openness, but meh bit depth does something about clarity as well. Gosh I really wish I had at least a Zoom F6 and of course the Rode NT1-A to finally put that debate to bed. If I had the 833 Sound-Devices than that will really put that to rest once and for all. The 833 replaces the verry much awesome $4000 744-T. Man I love that recorder. Loved it every time my friend Neal Ewers demoed it with the Rode NT1-A mic. Those demos from Neal are what made me want boath things.

[spacemissing]

There is a very important difference between how much dynamic range is Available
and how much dynamic range is Actually Used.

[HeavyMetalSonicRM]

My entire collection is 44.1. I assume there would be no advantage to having my DAC set higher, right?

[tzed]

Great explanation. I can't like it though because it currently has 808 likes and of course the we can't mess the one of the greatest drum machines of all time :-)

[therealboofighter]

1:51 would that be a “Paul-ie technic” school?

[hugobloemers]

Paul, help us help you by putting a link for your Octave records channel in the description :)