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Bitrates - what's it all about, Alfie?

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cochra1

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I was just wondering to myself - CDs are '16 bit', minidiscs are '8 bit' and SACD or DVD-A are '24 bit', with the bitrate referring to the number of increments of amptitude (volume), as I understand it. My pro music production soundcard goes up to 32 bit.

So obviously all these bitratings we hear about in compressed recordings of anything from 48kbps (poor quality) to 352kbps (best quality) must be something different entirely - it's like apples and bananas!

What does it actually mean? There must be some Tech-head out there who can explain!

Thanks in advance

Edited by KanakoAndTheNumbSkulls
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that is a good question to ask... but it is a much better thing to search :lol:

a very quick search (just entered 'audio' and 'bit' and voila, the first link was spot-on) in wiki gave this entrance which explains clearly the difference between bit-depth (the 16/24 stuff) an bitrates (the kbps-things)

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that is a good question to ask... but it is a much better thing to search :lol:

a very quick search (just entered 'audio' and 'bit' and voila, the first link was spot-on) in wiki gave this entrance which explains clearly the difference between bit-depth (the 16/24 stuff) an bitrates (the kbps-things)

Good man, you're quite right! :punish: Oof! Ok, ok, next time I'll search before asking, but many thanks for the link this time!

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Excellent, I have that sussed.

So Bit rate = (bit depth) x (sampling rate) x (number of channels)

Edited by KanakoAndTheNumbSkulls
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  • 2 weeks later...

PCM is a 44.1kHz, 16bit recording mode, compressed encoding is quite more complex and doesn't happen at a fixed bit depth. Read more here about the (old) ATRAC codec.

Fair play. I was told minidisc had a bit depth of 8-bit by my sound engineering lecturer (about 10 years ago) but I guess he had it wrong. I know that when recording in PCM mode (on Hi-MD recorders) the depth is 16-bit.

And I got it wrong regarding SACD also (D'oh) - I could've sworn it was 24 bit but it isn't, it's a different system altogether, but according to what I have now read, it is comparible to a PCM 20-bit recording.

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I'm glad that you got that 8bit thing cleared up. When you made this statement in another thread you also said that DVDA is 24bit. I'll clear this up to. The DVDA standard allows multiple bit word lengths and sampling rates, also in various number of channels.

I also stated in that thread that SACD is a 1bit system with a insanely high sampling rate, is this what your research come up with. I would gladly retract any misinformation I have given out.

Later, POE. :unsure:

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