Fun ‘n Profit Time

Now that we’ve waded through all of this, it’s time to add a grain of salt to this – sort of like an intellectual reality re-dither! The time-honored 16-bit 44.1 kHz. digital signal that lives on our CDs and DATs right now is really pretty good. My own personal feeling is that if you can’t make a good sounding recording in this format, you’ve got a problem that’s beyond what I can help you with!

That said, I also believe that recording engineering is an exercise in damage control as much as anything else – we start each recording with no mistakes or problems and try to keep to a minimum the number of mistakes and problems as decisions are made and the recording production progresses. Not only do we try to do the best that we can, we try to stretch the envelope of “what is best.”

So, keep your eye on the fundamentals: musical and artistic impact and quality, while tending to good recording craft, which includes all this obscure “edge of the envelope” digital stuff. When the opportunity comes to expand your bandwidth to 96 kHz., take it! When you can work with 24-bit words, do it! And don’t get psyched out by dither, just understand it enough to be able to make it help you when you need it. Meantime, don’t expect these things to replace good musicianship, production or engineering chops. They just add to them!

May You Have Many Bits Of Happiness!

Sidebar

The decibel is an expression of ratios, and it is a convenient way to talk about the huge range of magnitudes we work with in audio. At the same time, the decibel is regularly used in fixed relation to a variety of physical magnitudes. Here are some of the references for your information.

dB: dB is a ratio between two different magnitudes. It is not a fixed quantity. In a purely mathematical sense, 0 dB equals the number 1.

dBM: 0 dBM equals 1 milliWatt. A basic, if somewhat outdated, power reference. Often used sloppily as a voltage reference (see dBu), because 1 mW of power into a standard 600Ω load requires .775 volts. Part of the problem is that power (Watts) will vary as a function of load (resistance, ohms, Ω, so 1 milliWatt (0 dBM) will require different voltages for different loads. Consult Ohm’s Law.

dBV: 0 dBV equals 1 volt

dBu: 0 dBu equals .775 volts (see 0 dBM above). Only 2.2 dB different than 0 dBV, but in common use because 1 mW power and 600Ω loads were standards for so long.

dBFS: 0 dBFS (Full Scale) equals the maximum level on a meter, and typically, in digital audio, refers to the level at the top of all bits, or the maximum capacity of the word.

dB SPL: 0 dB SPL (Sound Pressure Level) equals .0002 microbars of atmospheric pressure, and is commonly regarded as the threshold of human hearing.