I drove over an old piece of plywood out in the field a couple of years ago=
. Turned out the bees had made their hive under it. I don't know if the ent=
ire field was suddenly filled with bees but the area around the tractor cer=
tainly was all the way back to the barn in sixth gear at full throttle.
Anyway, a good approximation is DR (dynamic range) as (DR-1.75)/6.03=3Dbits=
. With 110dB unweighted dynamic range you would get (110-1.75)/6.03=3D17.9=
5 or 18 bits of real data. Sound Devices may be doing a little better than =
that. Most microphones do not. The ME66, for examples has a dBMS of about 8=
4, in other words about 16 bits. You can oversample all you want but there =
will still only be 16 bits of data. It is correct that one gets the best dy=
namic range if you record as close to 0 dB as you can but unless there's pr=
ecious little peaking it's more typical to record at -10 or so to be safe. =
I often record two tracks, one about 7 dB hotter than the other. That way I=
still have sound if I'm clipping on the hotter channel.
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