Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
Oh, is this something akin to using resolution to create a sharper image, instead of creating more space on a computer screen?
Let's say you have a 1600x1200 (4:3) monitor at 24 inch. You could use a 3200x2400 monitor to create 4x the working space (and squint yourself to hell, probably), or you could do a 200% scale, and create a working space that is effectively the same as 1600x1200, but much sharper.
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Exactly.
With 16-bit sampling of an analogue signal, the input maximum amplitude range is divided into 65536 (2 to the 16th power) levels, and the value of the input signal at each sample point is approximated by the nearest level. With 24-bit sampling, you're dividing the input range into 16777216 (2 to the 24th power) steps, which clearly gives a much more accurate representation of the sampled signal.
This process is known as quantisation, and the differences between the 'real' analogue input values and their quantised approximations ('quantisation error') effectively adds some noise, which is known as 'quantisation noise'. If we have smaller steps, we have, on average, less quantisation error per sample, and hence less quantisation noise.
/JB