Quote:
Pro Tools is advertised as a "fully 48-bit mixer." In reality, the plug-in bus is only 24 bits, and crossfades and offline processes are done at 24 bits. Every time you add a plug-in or process a track, you lose resolution. When you add a plug-in on a group or on the stereo bus, you lose even more resolution. Pro Tools is sonically inferior to most native DAW's.
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Is this true?
If crossfades are done at 24 bits, does that mean other level-oriented and summing processes are performed at only 24 bit resolution?
Now, with regard to plug ins, I'll admit, I'm a little hazy on the plug standards. Is there provision in VST and DX for passing longer word lenths to plug-ins? (ie, is Nuendo able to pass a 32 bit floating point value to a VST plug?)
Anyhow, as long as the plug itself can use whatever word length it needs internally, I'm not sure I see a
huge problem inherent to the DAW passing the sound-to-be-processed to the plug at 24 bits and taking the processed sound back at 24 bits, which is an entirely adequate storage depth. (And, of course, what the plug does it its workarea is its own business and between the plug developer and the end user, as it were.) But, sure, the longer word length (greater numeric prescision) the better. You can never be too, rich, too thin, or...
Using 24 bit values for processing, OTOH, is obviously problematic, since every step that involves multiplication (and that's almost all of them) will result in a truncation to the resulting word lenth. Each truncation, brings another level of potential alias error at the 24 bit threshold. If, however, we throw a few extra bits of word length at our math space, we still end up rounding, but it's at a level that will eventually be discarded when we leave our (for instance) 32 bit 'workspace' for 24 bit 'storage.'