[sdiy] DACs on-board 12 vs external 16 vs 24 bit

[Tom Wiltshire]

Damian's answer of "do an experiment and see" is an excellent suggestion - take some good quality 24-bit audio and bitcrush it and see when you can tell the difference. But you asked the question in a general way, so I'll give you a general answer.

The average human isn't going to hear much, if any, difference between 12, 16 and 24 bit DACs if the sample rate is reasonably high.

I've experimented with audio at all of these bit widths (although never an A/B comparison, which would be important) and the quality of all of them is fine, and depends much more on other factors. Aliasing, for example. If you write some nice oscillator code that avoids aliasing and run it at a decent sample rate out through a 12-bit DAC, you'll get a more "high quality" result than if you do something ugly and play it back at 16-bit, complete with high-resolution aliased artefacts.
So my experience has been that perceived quality is affected more by the algorithm than the DAC resolution, at least from 12-bits upwards.
 
HTH,
Tom

On 6 Nov 2013, at 10:14, Justin Owen <juzowen at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> For a digital, micro-based oscillator (being used in a modular environment if that makes a difference) outputting the standard one waveform at a time sine, triangle, saw, pulse waveforms between e.g. 0.1 Hz and 20KHz (probably closer to a max of 10KHz) with the regular features of hard sync, FM, PWM, Unison etc.
> 
> ...how much difference is the average human going to hear between 12, 16 and 24 bit DACs?
> 
> For extra reference - I'm looking specifically at the 12-bit DACs on the STM32F407xx vs. the option of an external DAC of some sort.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> J
> 
> 
> 
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