How Many Bits are best?
Most manufacturers have moved from 16-bits up to 24-bits, even to 32-bits. Here, Stephen Dawson explores what happens to musical signals—and test tones—when you reduce the number of bits, in this case from 16-bits down to just 8-bits…
Everyone thinks music sounds better when you add bits, but what happens when you take them away? Stephen Dawson explores what happens when you drop from 16-bits down to just 8…
Digital audio is not a subject lending itself to intuitive human understanding. But we try to use words best suited to such understandings to describe it. Unfortunately, doing so often leads us astray.
So we have arguments between audiophiles and engineers on the value—even the audibility—of different forms of digital audio. Is DSD better-sounding than PCM, or is it merely a different way of representing a digital signal of a certain resolution? Does an increase in the PCM sampling frequency from 44.1kHz to 96kHz, or even to 192kHz, yield audible improvements? If so, how are they manifested? Is the increased resolution of 24- bit audio worth the doubling in file size that results from the increased resolution? (*1) How do you even judge these things? A good start is by gaining a strong understanding of what audible effects these things can actually have on music. But that can be difficult. Most people would accept that the difference in quality between 16-bit and 24-bit PCM sound is likely to be subtle, so it can be difficult to put your finger on what the precise difference is, if any.
Being human, our judgements about these things can be influenced by how we conceptualise them. But, as I stated at the outset, digital audio is not easily intuitive. So we might think in analogies. Simple math shows that 16-bit PCM defines sound on a scale with 65,536 levels. With 24-bits that scale goes to 16,777,216 levels. It is therefore tempting to think that because of the increased number of levels that 24bit PCM is going to sound smoother than 16bit PCM, since each sample is more precisely defined. Surely 16-bits will sound ‘grainier’, by analogy with coarse beach sand vs. the fine talc of 24-bits… and should sound even grainier still if you drop down even further to a mere 8-bits. That, after all, encodes each sample to one of just 256 levels! Are we now talking pebbles, rather than grains?
We all know 8-bit sound is awful. Or, at least, those of us old enough to remember the system sounds on Windows 95 (and earlier) computers, many of which were just 8-bits (and often 22.05kHz or lower in sampling frequency). But how bad the sound is, and bad in what way, is determined by more than just the bit depth. The sound—even 8-bit sound—can be treated to make it much better than you might expect.
Let’s illustrate this. I am using the final 13 seconds of the track Kangaroo Street, Part 1 from the album ‘Walk into the Sun’ by the Sydney
band B’Jezus (thanks to Jez Ford, editor of sister magazine Sound+Image, and leader of the group, for permission to use the track (*2). This is of course in standard CD quality— 16-bits, 44.1kHz sampling—and the section consists of a final refrain followed by a nicely natural acoustic fade out. I added one second of digital silence at the start to allow time for DACs to lock on. You can listen to it here:
tinyurl.com/bjezus-16-bit
Then I did a straight down-conversion to 8-bits. No changes other than that, and with no dither added. You can listen to it here:
tinyurl.com/bjezus-8-bit
Listening to this 8-bit version is fascinating. For the first second there is still no sound, because digital black in 8-bits is identical to digital black in 16-bits. But the instant the actual signal starts a background noise becomes obvious. For the first six or seven seconds it sounds more or less like white noise in the background of music that otherwise sounds the same as the original. But as the music quietens, particular during the decay of the gently plucked guitar strings, there is a distinct static-like feel, and the final decay of the guitar sounds like it has been placed in a fast modulation envelope, something which is definitely not there in the original.
This is the sum total of what happens when music is naively reduced in resolution. First, there is white noise. Second, there can be artefacts associated with low levels of signal. With 8-bits of resolution, any parts of the signal below –48dB will be encoded at either one or zero bits of resolution, effectively as square waves. That will both generate odd order harmonics and in the case of repeating
tones, emphasise the fundamental so that it peaks at –48dB.
So what can we do about it? Dither is the answer! Dither is low-level noise that is added to the signal. This has the effect of removing correlations and breaking up artefacts but in so doing it increases the level of the white noise. So the signal itself is just as pure as the original higher-resolution one, but it is now immersed in a fair bit of noise. You can hear the result here:
tinyurl.com/bjezus-8-bit-unshaped-dither
So what can we do about this noise? Noiseshaping is the answer! Basic dither just randomises the least significant bit of the signal—it randomly adds, or doesn’t add, one. Noise-shaped dither is noise which is stronger in some frequency bands than in others. There are plenty of shapes available, but the one that best suits our purposes is one that reduces the level of noise in the most audible part of the audio spectrum at the cost of increasing it in less audible parts. For this purpose I chose an aggressive one called ‘E2’ in my noise-shaping software, with a nominal 1-bit of depth. All the noise below about 11kHz is lower than with plain dithering, and more than 24dB lower down at 1kHz. But above 15kHz the noise is much louder. Listening-wise, it is far less objectionable and leaves the music much
clearer, as you’ll be able to hear at tinyurl.com/
bjezus-8-bit-shaped-dither. Fine-tuning with different noise-shaped curves and reduced levels of dither can improve the results further.
The graphics illustrate these shapes. Graph 1 shows the spectrum of a 980Hz sine wave at –80dB recorded (digitally created, actually) in 16-bits. Listen/download here: tinyurl.
com/980Hz-16-bit
Graph 2 shows a naive down-conversion to 8-bits (i.e. with no dither added). You will notice that not only has the noise floor increased from –136dB to –100dB, but there are now massive amounts of harmonic distortion— you can see distortion components right out to the fifteenth harmonic. Even more disturbingly, instead of being at –80dB, the main tone is now at –48dB and most of the distortion components are higher in level than the fundamental itself is supposed to be! Listen/ download here: tinyurl.com/980Hz-8-bit
Play this loud and the 980Hz tone sounds ‘way too loud, and rather like a square wave, thanks to the harmonics.
Once we add dither, proper order is restored, as shown in Graph 3. The harmonics disappear and the 980Hz tone resumes its proper level. But the noise floor is now up at –88dB, an increase of 12dB. This means
that although the tone is at the same level as previously, it is now only 8dB higher than the noise, and I was unable to hear it when I turned up the volume. Listen/download here:
tinyurl.com/980Hz-8-bit-unshaped-dither
Finally, Graph 4 shows what happens when the original tone is down-converted to 8-bits, with the addition of noise-shaped dither. With the E2 noise-shaped dither, the 980Hz tone is still at the proper level, and still undistorted (no harmonic distortion components visible), but it’s now around 30dB higher above the noise floor in its frequency band. In the band of frequencies to which the ear is most sensitive, the noise is greatly lowered. When I listened to this, the tone was audible and clean with the volume advanced. Listen/download here: tinyurl.com/980Hz-8-bit-shaped-dither
Let’s pause for a moment. This sine wave peaks at –80dB, which is 32dB below what you’d expect to be the resolving ability of 8-bit PCM. Yet with the addition of some shaped dither—the addition of some artificial noise— it becomes clear and clean-sounding.
Although the four graphs in this article are instructional, and show you what’s going on, it’s more important to listen to the effects of down-conversion and dither with your own ears, so the four versions of the musical ex- cerpt, and the four versions of the –80dB 980Hz tone, can be downloaded from my website article ‘The Magic of Dither’ [ tinyurl.
com/magic-of-dither] (where I also explain why the 980Hz signal was made too loud by the undithered 8-bit conversion) or from AV Hub here: tinyurl.com/ahf-all-tones. You might be surprised that the 8-bit version with noise-shaped dither is almost listenable, and does not sound at all like what most people’s preconception of 8-bit audio should sound like.
So when assessing 16-bit versus 24-bit sound, you know what to listen for. Just remember the noise will be 48dB quieter, and any artefacts in the undithered material will not only be 48dB quieter, but they will also be much rarer since much less content is encoded to less than –96dB than there is to –48dB.
Stephen Dawson
(*2) You can hear the complete track, along with the rest of the album, at https://sound
cloud.com/bjezus)
(*1) In the real world, lossless compression is much less efficient with the additional 8-bits than with the most significant 16-bits, because the additional bits mostly encode noise.