Recording quality question

[leykis101]

Had a question.

normally roll my recording at 16bit, but if I record it at 24 bit is it easy to down size it to 16 bit? easy to use software to do it?

Is it worth it to do it that way, (I end up burning all my recordings to cdr discs for my listening, instead of storing it on a hard drive). Is there a noticeable sound difference?

thanks in advance

[DanielG]

Yeah, it's easy to resample a 24 bit recording down to 16 bit. There's a program called r8Brain that will do it.

http://www.voxengo.com/product/r8brain/

Is it worth recording in 24 bit? Well if you're just going to be listening to it in 16 bit and you're not planning on keeping the 24 bit version, then it's a bit pointless. Depending on the quality of your mics you may not even be able to hear the difference.

Try it out youself and see what you think/

[sloppyart]

The main advantage of recording at 24 bit is that you will have less degradation of the sound quality after you perform any changes such as EQ and changing levels.

I always record at 24/48 so I can make changes in post with the least amount of trouble.

A nice advantage of this is being able to run your levels a little lower at the show to give you more margin of error from clipping and then boost the levels in post.

I generally don't share my 24 bit recordings because I don't think they sound any better, but it is nice to have the 24 bit masters.

[rspencer]

What sloppyart said.
I record at 24 bit, but only share (or even listen to) 16 bit.
Recording levels can be conservative because (in general simple terms) the "lowest" 8 bits will be truncated, much of which is noise.