![]() Impressed by the sheer conversion quality of Saracon, we were wondering whether we could harness said quality to record in one format, and edit/mix/master in another. And it seemed like our journey would end there. We also found out that when you apply any kind of DSP (room correction, sample rate conversion or whatever else) through your streaming software, it would be better to do so from the original raw 32bit floating point output rather than the 24bit version, so we began offering this 32bit downloadable too. (This process is now almost complete, by the way, so most downloads in our shop are the “upgraded” ones.) Such a huge difference indeed, that we decided to “upgrade” our entire catalogue, by going back to all the original sessions, rendering the raw 32bit floating point output, and then creating our downloadables through Saracon. Comparing a 24bit DXD file rendered from the same 32bit source as the 24bit file created in Pyramix was mind-boggling. Since we now figured that our streaming software did a better job at dithering/noise-shaping than our mastering software, perhaps there was software that could do this even better! After a long period of trying out all different kinds of software, we found that Weiss Engineering Saracon did just that. By setting up our streamer in a way that it automatically reduces/dithers/noise-shapes the 32bit floating point version to 24bit, we were now comparing two different 24bit versions: one created by our mastering software, and one created by our streaming software. ![]() ![]() Mind you, the only thing that should differ between these files is that the 24bit version would have some kind of dithering/noise-shaping applied to account for the word length reduction. Our entire team would be able to hear the differences, almost every time preferring the 32bit floating point version. We did a double-blind test, where we rendered a master at both 24bit and 32bit floating point, and played it back through our software of choice, Roon. Strange, we thought, since 24 bits is more than plenty in terms of dynamic range (144dB to be precise), and the difference was so big we couldn’t attribute it to just the word length or dynamic range itself. From 24bit to 32bit floating pointĮver since the very beginnings of TRPTK and up until a relatively little while ago, we have recorded all our albums in DXD 352.8kHz 24bit, and mastered in 32bit floating point. About a year and a half ago, we first noticed that the 32bit floating point output of the digital audio workstation we used back then (Merging Technologies’ Pyramix, the software pretty much everyone in our industry uses) would sound dramatically better than its 24bit output. And today, let me tell you the story of how we ended up changing our entire production chain to provide you with better quality music whilst lowering our overall resolution. In our never-ending quest for the ultimate sound quality, we have been looking for tools and techniques that help us get precisely there.
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