I totally agree!

I actually really like low-fi sounds, and in these last times I do my best trying to sample old gear instead of using soft synths as VSTs in Live. I find the 80’s electronic music recordings so raw, and sounding much better than modern electronic music.
I understood the reason about this reading about recording techniques, and equipment used those times:
8 or 12bit samplers, FM and analogue synths, analogue mixers, tape recorders…
Is it possible to recreate a similar sound in Ableton now?
Redux doesn’t really match the sound I’m intended to get, which should be like an Emulator II (8bit 27Khz), or an SP1200 (12bit 22Khz), or an AKAI Mpc2000…

I wasn’t trying to make any sort of pro/con argument, and fully admit I’m sorta out of my depth here. I was merely making a comment on who Cakewalk marketing is likely targeting with this boast, other than power-geeks who just want the latest and greatest and the most perceived bang for their buck.

I watched a video online somewhere that showed the inside of a large pro film scoring studio, where they had a server room of PCs networked, and a huge 128(?) channel board/controller. It was enlightening about who these companies are targeting with some these more high-spec features.

But what do I know? I work at 44.1/24. I keep the 64bit signal chain engaged but more from inertia - really what harm can it do?

Man, these companies have technology users eating out their hand :) What makes you think that 64 bit versus 32 bit floating point is about high definition audio?

But I heartily agree with you, Peter.

My own opinion on the matter is generally the same as yours; there is no audible difference between 32-bit and 64-bit summing busses, all else being equal.

The problem is that hardly anything else is ever equal.

-CR

@Chris Randall: “24 bit samples” and “64 bit processing” are not really related to each other. “24 bit samples” describes the format that your audio interface provides/receives. There is no h/w that provides even 32 bit samples at this time, and there almost certainly never will. Ask if you need to understand why, the answer is physics not technology. As Peter sort of indicated, the most important areas for “64 bit processing” are the bus/signal routing pathways used between elements of the processing chain, and the actual summing mixer itself.

My own, decidedly non-double blind experience (you may therefore discount it entirely) is that computation with double precision floats *can* benefit audio synthesis, but has no detectable effect on summing mixers and even less on data pathways (compared to 32 bit (”single precision”) floating point).

Finally, I’d like to remind everyone that CPUs have provided double precision floats, which is really what is being discussed here, for a long time. All that is new on modern CPUs is their ability to more efficiently use 64 bit *integer and pointer* values. Great, except that almost no audio software uses 64 bit integer values for any part of the signal processing pathway. As a result, the real win here, other than some relatively minor improvements in the system memory bus bandwidths that benefits dbl-precision floats as a side effect, is the ability to address more memory. File sizes larger than 4GB no longer need fun and games (though they do need something other than RIFF/WAV format :) and a boatload of samples cached in 8GB of RAM are all addressed without MS-style segmented addressing. Sweet for programmers, and perhaps even manna for users.