24-bit audio is obviously a noticeable improvement even on $150 headphones. I don't know why you think that. Similarly, 4k Blu-ray is obviously vastly superior to crappy compressed streams from Netflix or YouTube.
> 24-bit audio is obviously a noticeable improvement
16-bit is (IIRC) 96 dB of dynamic range, going from well below human perceptual noise level to above damage threshold.
24-bit is good for headroom when recording/mixing but useless for listening.
If there's any difference between a 16-bit and a 24-bit version it's either because they're actually not the same (different mixing/mastering^) or they're just poorly mixed/mastered from the start and don't use the full 16-bit (or 24-bit for that matter) dynamic range: if you by and large use only 2/3 of the bits to actually convey a signal change then it may say 16-bit on the tin but it's actually 10-bit or something, (and for 24-bit it's only using... 16-bit!) and the remainder bits are just wasted space.
^ I find that quite frequent on vinyl vs digital: vinyl sounds better not because of some inherent property of the medium but because the mastering (and sometimes even the mixing) is simply not the same, presumably because it doesn't cater for the same audience/use case (vinyl at home for amateurs/enthusiasts/audiophiles, digital for a much wider variety of users, listening conditions, and listening hardware)
> 24-bit audio is obviously a noticeable improvement even on $150 headphones
Not going to question your subjective experience, but I do not think most people will hear any difference between 16 and 24 bit playbacks under normal conditions, even with fancy headphones.
"120dB is greater than the difference between a mosquito somewhere in the same room and a jackhammer a foot away.... or the difference between a deserted 'soundproof' room and a sound loud enough to cause hearing damage in seconds.
16 bits is enough to store all we can hear, and will be enough forever." [1]
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It's true that 16 bit linear PCM audio does not quite cover the entire theoretical dynamic range of the human ear in ideal conditions. Also, there are (and always will be) reasons to use more than 16 bits in recording and production.
None of that is relevant to playback; here 24 bit audio is as useless as 192kHz sampling. The good news is that at least 24 bit depth doesn't harm fidelity. It just doesn't help, and also wastes space.
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> Not going to question your subjective experience
Read enough glowing product reviews from "audiophiles" on nonsense like $100 electrical sockets and $75 Ethernet cables and you'll start to question everything.
> 24-bit audio is obviously a noticeable improvement
Audio quality is famous for having an extremely strong placebo effect. Unless you did the test double blinded, your anecdote has a good chance of being wrong.
It isn't obviously noticeable when 99.9% of people could not tell the difference. Take Pet Sounds which was mixed in mono onto analogue tape, hiss and all. Most people do not have magic ears.
I thought I'd read studies on this, but it turns out it was on sample frequency rather then bit depth.
However, seeing as in audio bit depth only affects dynamic range, you'd have to be listening to something with an extreme dynamic range to hear it. I can see why higher bit depth is useful in recording, but not in playback.
> The extra dynamic range helps bypass bad mastering.
I'm not an audio engineer by any means, but I'm not sure that sentence makes sense. Mastering is what produces the final audio output - if you take a badly compressed master it's not going to matter if you export it to 16 or 24 bit.
>Nor can anyone hear the difference between a 16bit and a 24bit file, all else being equal.
While we don't know the exact dynamic range of human hearing, we do know it to be above 96dB.
Either way, using these 96dB in 16bit requires careful mastering.
With CDs, it is not possible to e.g. make a song quieter than the others in the CD without losing this 96dB range. There's no "ReplayGain" metadata in the discs; the format is aged and not fancy at all.
The mastering would have to be basically non-existent for it to use a dynamic range larger than available in 16bit, and would mean noone would ever hear the quieter parts.
If we're talking unmastered recordings for archival, yes 24bit is very useful. For final mastered copies released for listening it's completely untrue that 16bit doesn't offer enough dynamic range.
The way the “loudness wars” work is by reducing the dynamic range to be far narrower than what’s available at 16bit, which gives the impression of loudness even though the loudest sounds are no louder.
Lets say the mastering process compresses the recording extremely to a 42dB (8bit) range - outputting that to either 16 or 24 bit will make zero difference. The audio will still have a dynamic range of 42dB.
