64-bit audio (was: Re: If you pirate music, you're downloading communism!)

[Paul Mather]

On 26 Mar 2009, at 8:41 AM, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:

> On 26 Mar 2009, at 07:34, Swartz, John A. wrote:
>> And how do you want your music produced?  64-bit recordings on Blu- 
>> ray?
>
>
> Sure, why not? :)  After all, as the internet gets faster 16-bit CD  
> audio will start to seem small and dinky. :)


Why wait?  I think you should pioneer this format yourself.  And  
here's how: all you need to do is insert random numbers into the lower  
32 bits or so of each sample and you'll have something approaching  
what the real thing would be should it ever arrive.

Seriously, though, there is even argument that 24-bit audio runs up  
against the quantisation limits of A/D hardware: in essence that the  
lower bits are just random noise and are not giving you any real  
information because the hardware cannot resolve that sufficiently. I  
can appreciate going to 32-bits as an editing format, to give  
numerical headroom when performing signal processing algorithms, but  
64-bit would be redundant as a listening format---certainly until the  
human perceptual system itself undergoes a massive evolution and is  
able to perceive finer just-noticeable-differences than it currently  
does.  (Humans do not perceive loudness or pitch linearly.)

Besides, in the history of digital audio, word length has not been the  
enemy of fidelity, lossy compression has.  Even if you went to 64-bit  
audio, lossy compression would still be trying to throw away as many  
of those 64-bit samples as it could. :-)  Better for all around if  
lossless formats became de facto, with lossy used as a temporary  
format used only for resource-limited portable listening devices or lo- 
fi previews.

Sad to realise it, but as technology has improved audio fidelity has  
gone down.  How bizarre!  (It's all down to a triumph of marketing/ 
convenience, I reckon.)

Cheers,

Paul.

e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
  deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
         --- Frank Vincent Zappa