KVR Audio

Sam-U · Post by **Sam-U** » Sat Feb 17, 2018 6:10 pm

It's rather a companies decision than a technical reason. Providing 32bit versions of a product is only another compiling task. Unless they've written very shitty code this is not a big deal. But they have to setup 32bit test systems too which might be a drawback for them. The more of the big players like Cubase or Logic move away from x86 the more of the (especially new) devs will move too.

Teksonik · Post by **Teksonik** » Sat Feb 17, 2018 6:33 pm

Move forward or get left behind........

Apratim · Post by **Apratim** » Sat Feb 17, 2018 7:02 pm

next what ????

.... may be 64 bit internal audio processing will become the standard and 32 bit will become obsolete like 32 bit vst in 10 years or may be 20 years

Teksonik · Post by **Teksonik** » Sat Feb 17, 2018 7:05 pm

I'll be dead in 20 years......so I don't care.....

Apratim · Post by **Apratim** » Sat Feb 17, 2018 7:20 pm

i still have 51 years (if 70 years is considered as the average a human can live) .... so i care

aciddose · Post by **aciddose** » Sat Feb 17, 2018 7:26 pm

You should also care about the fact you'll be mostly deaf in only 20 years (depending on your definition of "deaf" and "mostly") and that you can't actually hear any difference between 32-bit and 64-bit floating point values right now with a less than ideal audio hardware set up like a sound-proof isolation booth with a top quality pair of headphones powered by a top quality amplifier and audio interface, let alone when you're 65 and can't even make out what someone says anymore.

Hearing loss is partially generic, partially environmental (including diet and exposure: avoid all NSAIDs and others which are ototoxic) along with other seemingly random factors we don't fully understand. That said, it's certainly something to note as unless you're very lucky to be a 1/10 or 1/100 person with minimal hearing loss, most people already have significant loss when they hit 30!

64-bit float is more important for specific types of audio processing, where generally speaking it is already used. Many hosts such as Reaper are already 64-bit only by default and convert 32-bit float signals to 64-bit float and vice versa automatically.

It definitely makes sense for certain plug-ins to implement this such as compressors or high-quality audio sources (likely to be fed to compressors). However, if you are playing back 8-bit samples it won't help you one bit (hah!) to convert to a higher bit-depth since you've lost that information at the origin of the recorded signal.

martinjuenke · Post by **martinjuenke** » Sat Feb 17, 2018 7:38 pm

Waiting for the rush to 128-bit DAWs...

toonertik · Post by **toonertik** » Sat Feb 17, 2018 10:08 pm

acid_dosed_1_too_many wrote:You should also care about the fact you'll be mostly deaf in only 20 years (depending on your definition of "deaf" and "mostly")Ra_ra_ra>>> blah_blah_blah, let alone when you're 65 and can't even make out what someone says anymore.

Hearing loss is partially generic, partially environmental (including diet and exposure: avoid all NSAIDs and others which are ototoxic) along with other seemingly random factors we don't fully understand. That said, it's certainly something to note as unless you're very lucky to be a 1/10 or 1/100 person with minimal hearing loss, most people already have significant loss when they hit 30!

toonertik wrote: Yeah>> what did you say, I can't hear you acid_man, I am only a year or so being completely deaf by your reckoning.

The silence... oh the silence, it is deafening.
Man, I have seen some tosh in my life...
but oh what fun to see the tosh that appears on KVR.....

BTW... I thought it was sampling rate that affected frequency not bit depth and that the bit rate was concerned with the accuracy of the audio process
but hey... what does an old man know

aciddose · Post by **aciddose** » Sat Feb 17, 2018 11:50 pm

Do you think hearing loss is only about frequency range? It's a more complicated subject than that.

Human hearing is far, far exceeded by 24-bit audio already which is well within the range of 32-bit float to represent accurately with no precision loss based upon magnitude.

Your problem is what you don't know, not what you do know or think you know.

swatwork · Post by **swatwork** » Sun Feb 18, 2018 8:54 am

toonertik wrote:BTW... I thought it was sampling rate that affected frequency not bit depth and that the bit rate was concerned with the accuracy of the audio process
but hey... what does an old man know

I think what the "professor" is trying to say is that a bit depth of 24-bits provides a maximum dynamic range of about 144 dB which can easily accommodate the 'maximum' dynamic range of human hearing, which is about 120 dB, and any reduced dynamic-range sensitivity caused by hearing loss.

layzer · Post by **layzer** » Sun Feb 18, 2018 1:57 pm

really dont give a F**K. theres already every type of plugin available in 32bit to make just about any sound imaginable. so F**K 64bit only devs

layzer · Post by **layzer** » Sun Feb 18, 2018 1:59 pm

martinjuenke wrote:Waiting for the rush to 128-bit DAWs...

thats even a waste. 512bit daws and plugins is the way to go

Aloysius · Post by **Aloysius** » Sun Feb 18, 2018 5:38 pm

swatwork wrote:
toonertik wrote:BTW... I thought it was sampling rate that affected frequency not bit depth and that the bit rate was concerned with the accuracy of the audio process
but hey... what does an old man know
I think what the "professor" is trying to say is bulls*it.

+1

Ah_Dziz · Post by **Ah_Dziz** » Mon Feb 19, 2018 2:28 pm

Apratim wrote:next what ????

.... may be 64 bit internal audio processing will become the standard and 32 bit will become obsolete like 32 bit vst in 10 years or may be 20 years

A pretty large portion of plugins use 64-bit internal processing already. Double precision processing is useful in many feedback based effects (which is quite a few of them). When running simple mathematical procedures like summing multiple digital audio streams through attenuators in you DAWs mixer, 32- bit floating point is far more than enough. While some DAWs will run in 64 bit floating point mode, and handle 64-bit files, I would guess it's overkill and a bit of a waste of storage to use it. I doubt that 64 bit audio files will catch on anytime in the foreseeable future, but running processes that require a large number of iterations is already done in 64 bit precision.

mcbpete · Post by **mcbpete** » Mon Feb 19, 2018 2:35 pm

aciddose wrote:You should also care about the fact you'll be mostly deaf in only 20 years (depending on your definition of "deaf" and "mostly") and that you can't actually hear any difference between 32-bit and 64-bit floating point values right now with a less than ideal audio hardware set up like a sound-proof isolation booth with a top quality pair of headphones powered by a top quality amplifier and audio interface, let alone when you're 65 and can't even make out what someone says anymore.

The 64-bit that's in discussion here is memory related rather than audio bit-depth related. A 64bit DAW won't sound any different from a 32bit DAW one, but will allow the addressing of more than 4Gb memory per process which is pretty handy for users of large sample-based plugins

Another company goes 64-bit only