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[batman876]

How is this possible? Better quality than a WAV file (16bit) ? Is MC upscaling, if so how to turn it off?

Lots of questions on one line. Would be grateful if anyone could shed some light on this.
I'm a smart cookie but thought MC should output the same as the source.

Thank you.

[JimH]

If you're seeing that in MC, it means your file was encoded at 64Kbps.  That's a lower quality MP3 file.

You could look at the options in DSP Studio/Output.

[Alex B]

A bit depth value is not exactly a quality indicator. It just shows the available range of the S/N ratio. For example, if the integer bit depth is 16, the available range is 96 dB which is enough for any practical use.

If the maximum possible volume level of a given playback system is e.g. 110 dB SPL, the 16-bit range starts from 14 dB SPL which is quieter than the background noise level of any normal listening room. On this example system using a higher bit depth like 24 dB would not improve the quality of the sound in the range of 20-110 dB SPL at all. In theory it would improve the quality of the least significant bit of the 16-bit data (which would produce the 14-20 dB SPL range in this example), but even in a dead silent anechoic chamber you would be unlikely to be able to say anything about the quality of the faint sound that can just barely be detected to exist. (In addition, the noise that is produced by the analog HW would probably mask this audio signal anyway.)

The MP3 format does not store the integer bit depth data. The bit depth in MP3 is "floating". Depending on the audio data the effective bit depth can momentarily be anything (like 1 bit). For the most part lossy audio compression is about bit depth reduction. When faint audio signals are masked by louder signals they are more or less replaced with noise. This S/N reduction is inaudible (at least that is the intention).

Since MC's internal processing uses 64-bit floating point precision it is logical to decode MP3 data directly to that format without doing an intermediate conversion to an integer bit depth format. In theory this is a more precise way to handle MP3 data.

[Alex B]

Jim, I think batman876 means the source bit depth that is displayed in DSP Studio during playback, not the bit rate of the MP3 file that is displayed in the file properties.

[batman876]

Thanks for the replies. And thank you Alex B, I was indeed meaning the source bit depth displayed in DSP Studio.

I assume that a WAV file bit depth is "fixed" then? And as you said bit depth is not so much quality so a 16bit WAV file will sound much better than a 64bit mp3 right? Last one, is output in 64bit the best way to hear the original file/i.e. the way with least processing, I guess since mp3 is floating the higher the output bit depth the better?

To be honest a bit above my head but I'm humbled to be in such knowledgeable company.

Thanks again.

[jmone]

FYI - I've brought this up with Matt before as I think it is confusing to present the DSP info this way as the inevitable comparison like that batman876 is made.  The answer is two fold:
1) MP3's don't have a "bit depth" like with WAV
2) the 64-Bit is referring to MC's decoding of the MP3 to 64-Bit.