I'd agree that 24 bit files do seem to reveal better low-level detail, and I notice ambience cues and reverberation more distinctly. Not a HUGE difference, but noticable,
Nick/Stan, that is an interesting idea - you would ideally have different audio signals such as speech combined at differnent levels,say -40db, -60db, which are then truncated to different bit depths and then padded into a 24bit format to see how integlligability is affected by reducing the bit depth. Is this easily achievable?.
A controlled test of this sort would help weed out the influence of the mastering/production chain.
In terms of what I have noticed, I personally think you are into rapidly diminishing gains beyond 24/48. I have done some testing with downsampling with dither via DBPoweramp DSP, resampling a 24/192 recording from 2L to 24/96, 24/48, 24/44.1 and finally 16/44.1. No ABX or anything, but I couldn't tell the differnece between 24/192 and 24/96, 24/48 still sounded practically the same, 24/44.1 was a little worse and 16/44 was noticably different. Not a really big differnece between any of the 24 bit format.
Regards,
Alex
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