Howdy Twinkles, > What is the real difference between 8 and 16 bit audio at the same > sampling frequency? According to the standard approximations of the statistical formulation (which allows ~6dB/bit) - about 48 dB of SNR... If this means nothing to you, then consider that even basic cassette decks are typically considered to have ~60 dB of SNR - 8 bit audio is about the fidelity of a low end record player (though with very different noise characteristics) or an AM radio. As Greg pointed out, even you telephone's mulaw codec (which uses 8 bit words) claims ~14 bit quality. > Doesn't the number of bits indicate the voltage (volume > level)? In the final analysis, yes, it indicates the number of discrete in- or output voltage (which is not volume in the technical sense, but rather amplitude) levels. > If so, on > el-cheapo cards like my SB16 where there are only 256 levels of volume > anyway, would 8 bit seem more appropriate? It would save 50% space!! I thought the '16' in SoundBlaster16 indicated the number of bits it used for words? It may not be truly capable of accurately reproducing 16-bit audio through its DACs, and most probably does not use the proper internal overhead of bits to maintain 16-bit quality through mixing, etc., but I doubt very much that it really only has 8-bit output quality? Early games machines used 8-bit audio to 'save 50% space', with resulting quality problems... Alex -- MP3 ENCODER mailing list ( http://geek.rcc.se/mp3encoder/ )
