how to improve your home studio recording quality?

Hardware & Software optimization can do miracles. Digital audio is all about :dynamic range, measured in bits (which is volume resolution); a 16-bit recording can have 2^16 possible values. The second digital parameter is the sampling frequency measured in Hz (samples per second /2) = maximum analog frequency.

So, AUDIO DATA RATE=BITS x Hz

Audio Data Rate of a standard music cd
(to PCM uncompressed audio)

(((16 x 44100) / 1,048,576) / 8) x 60 = ~5.0 MiB/Min

what do we see here?
Bits x Hz divided by 1048576 to convert from bits to mebibits
*one mebibyte 1 MiB = 2^20 B = 1 048 576 B (remember we’re binary in digital world)
let’s divide it by 8 to convert to mebibytes
and
the last step
multiply by 60 to convert to minutes

—
to sum up
PCM audio = uncompressed digital audio
CD stores 80 minutes of stereo audio
our Audio Data Rate is ~5 MiB/Min
so
WAV format will take 400 Mb per track
8 tracks of audio = ~3.2 GB
16 tracks = ~ 6.4 GB

—
Almost done
one last thing here is the data rate (generated per second)
Frequency × bit depth × channels = bit rate
44,100 samples per second × 16 bits per sample × 2 channels(stereo tracks) = 1,411,200 bits per second (or 1,411.2 kbps) =>
~10.1 Mb per 1 minute for a stereo track
for a CD of 80 minutes
16 tracks (8 stereo tracks) => 1.3 Mb/s and 6.4 Gb of storage
32 tracks => 2.7 Mb/s and 12.92 Gb of storage
64 tracks => 5.4 Mb/s and 25.84 Gb of storage
—
Now, the conclusion:
your regular hard drive is 5400 rpm
that’s 100 Mb/s read/write speed
the faster hard drive is 7200 rpm =>
128 Mb/s – about 30% faster
and SSD (consumer types)=>~500Mb/s (average today) and newer up to 3200/2100 Mb/s read/write speed (such as samsung M.2)

so hard drive wise a home studio doesn’t have to be expensive and still be capable of more than you need
#ITbassist out
—
next time:
memory, processors and bus speed