Bitrate Comparison Question

Just dither your 24 bit wave to 16 bit/44 and use a good mp3 converter. When you burn CD's, you're not listening to 24 bit so don't beat yourself up to do an mp3 that way. As long as it's dithered properly (or heck, try no dither...just convert a wave out of Sonar at 16/44 when you export) you shouldn't be able to notice because the dithering and convert sample rate preserves what you've done in 24 bit. I do all my recording at 24/48. When I export a project and dither/CSR, I don't hear any difference at all and you shouldn't. Now you may notice a little quality loss with a 256kb mp3, but even there, it should be cd quality to the human ears. Anything higher than 160kb is going to be nearly free of artifacts.

As for your question about 196/24 vs 256/16, no it shouldn't make much difference at all. The 256 may even sound better because the higher the kb, the better they sound. The reason you won't hear much difference is because it's digital. What you put in is what you get out. Meaning, if we record at 24/96...we'll need to go down to 16/44 to hear that on CD. When we dither and CSR (convert sample rate) the original 24/96 is preserved because that's how digital works. You're not losing quality by going down to 16/44 from 24/48 and if you are, you're not doing something right. Certain dithering or even some noise shaping in dithering, can change the sound of your audio a bit. Some guys swear they can tell a difference while others can't tell whether something was dithered or just exported and bit/sample converted without dithering. It's one of those discussions that's been going on since dithering was introduced.

For what you're doing, record and mix at 24/44/48 or whatever and export at 16/44 and use triangular dither or POW-R 3 which is what I always use for quickie ideas out of Sonar, yet people have bashed that setting on here many times. For my serious stuff, I dither and CSR at the mastering stage and usually use something by Waves. But you shouldn't hear a bad difference in the 16/44 wave. Then, just get a good mp3 encoder, use CBR (constant bit rate) and the slowest form of encoding so you get the least amount of artifacts at 256kb. You'll have smaller files and the audio quality will be just as good, I promise you. Anything 160kb and under is where you start to lose quality in an mp3 to my ears. Good luck...and I hope this helps a bit. :)

-Danny 

Thanks guys, that's exactly what I was looking for.

And I can only tell a slight difference between 192K and WAV.  Just trying to present the best quality i can.

Cheers.

256kb/s 16-bit would be my preference and recommendation. Bit depth is far less significant in a finished, mastered song than bit rate.

The perceptual difference between 192 and 256 is slight but it depends on the material. A song with lots of high-frequency content, perhaps a mandolin or chimes or even a bright steel-string acoustic guitar will reveal the differences.