Patrick Dixon;289100 Wrote: > Oh try harder! I'm asking to consider the 'problem' and come up with a > reason why someone might be able to hear rounding at the 24-bit in a > digital volume control (like the SB3 has)
I already did: you didn't enjoy your breakfast that morning. It's very, very simple - if you take a 24 bit binary number and divide it by some factor, the error you make will be in the "25th" bit (if you round properly). If you truncate rather than rounding, the error may be in the 24th bit, but that's as bad as it can possibly be. So the error - I'm talking about the absolute error, *NOT* the error as a percentage of the signal - is never larger than 000000000000000000000001. So all we have to ask is whether 000000000000000000000001 is ever audible on a stereo system. It has the best chance with the analogue gain maxed, but as I've shown it remains waaaaay below the threshold of audibility even then. You are probably confusing S/N - which will be much lower than 144dB in these cases, since the original data was 16 bit - with audibility of the distortion caused by rounding. Let me try to clarify that for you. Here are two ways in which distortion can be inaudible: 1) The S/N is sufficiently high, so that you do not hear the noise/distortion no matter how load the sound is, because the signal always masks the distortion. That is one case where we don't have to worry about distortion. A good example of that is the noise floor of the SB while playing music. 2) The maximum possible level of the noise/distortion is too low to be audible *even when it's played without the signal*. In this case it will *never* be audible - even when the S/N ratio is *0*. There are no exceptions, and that's what I've shown is the case of a rounding error in 24 bit audio. -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=45736 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
