The Beatles Remastered: 16 vs 24 bit

[mjb]

The green apple dongle (24/44 FLAC) has been out for a while (since Christmas, 2009 I believe), so I'm interested to hear if anyone else has compared it with the the CD (16/44) version? I'm very happy with my copy, and its probably what started me on my quest for HD music, but I guess there's a debate whether it's *really* better.

[JonMarsh]

Well, that is an interesting question- I've been planning on getting one of those 24 bit dongles, but still haven't gotten around to it. Frankly, it probably depends on the noise floor of the original recordings and how well reverb tails and other low level stuff is handled on the 16 bit version versus 24 bit. If you did a 16 bit version with mBit dithering, I suspect you wouldn't hear any difference. If they didn't do any intelligent dithering, then perhaps you would. Then, too, it all depend on your DAC. Even many so called high performance DAC's don't have more than an 18 bit noise floor, and I've seen ones billed as high resolution that hardly get 16 bits on high res data-

For example, look at the swept noise floor with 16 bit and 24 bit data for the Playback Designs MPS-5 SACD/CD player.




Fig.3 Playback Designs MPS-5, 1/3-octave spectrum with noise and spuriae of dithered 1kHz tone at –90dBFS with: 16-bit data (top), 24-bit data (middle at 2kHz), DSD data (top trace at 20kHz). (Right channel dashed.)


To understand just how poor this is, here is the same sort of test, also by Stereophile, for the NAD M51 DAC.




Fig.3 NAD M51, 1/3-octave spectrum with noise and spuriae of dithered 1kHz tone at –90dBFS, with: 16-bit data (top), 24-bit data (middle), dithered 1kHz tone at –120dBFS with 24-bit data (bottom) (right channel dashed).


Sooo, in summary, I'd say, "it all depends...." but in general, I expect they didn't do the 24 bit thing just as a marketing spoof, so I'd say hold on to what you've got...