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AudioSystem EWX 24/96
Tips and Valuable Information.
About Hard-drives and Necessary Space.
So now we have a new recording device with which we can suddenly realize a higher
quality than was previously possible. Naturally there is – like with most good things in
life – a hitch: as quickly as the quality rises, the necessary drive space increases cor-
respondingly. You should therefore keep in mind; by your 24 Bit recording you’ll need
an appropriately large and fast drive.
To get a general idea what amount of data your drive has to be able to handle in order
to maintain such a high standard of quality, here is a small easy formula you can use
to factor the average requirements.
Desired number of tracks x resolution in BIT x sample rate in Hz divided by 8 divided by 1024
and divided again by 1024 = MB/s
So a stereo track (that’s 2 tracks) at the highest resolution is expressed with the fol-
lowing equation in Megabytes per second:
2 x 24 x 96000 / 8 / 1024 / 1024 = ~ 0,55
With a little over a half a MB per second the hard drive requirement reaches 33 MB in
one minute.
It gets really interesting when you start to think about the
data transfer
involved in a
multi-track recording: with 8 tracks then according to the figures you’re going to need
2,2 MB per second. For a “normal” arrangement with about 20 tracks (wherefrom we’ll
say 16 are played simultaneously) then you can count on needing to handle around
5 MB per second. And we are obviously only dealing with playback here.
Of course we’re not trying to talk you out of using the high resolution. You should
consider however, depending on the song and the situation you may want to demand
less from the workload of your system. In many cases the difference between 48 kHz
and 96 kHz isn’t really such a major factor. “Give it everything ya got!” doesn’t always
have to be. ;-)
