Bit Depth Stuck at 24 bit (ghosted out) (Sonar paid)

[ZincT]

I need to change it to 16 bit and it is currently ghosted out. I haven't needed to change it in a while and it used to work in CbB (but is also ghosted out there).

My interface is the one I've been using for years (IK AXE IO).

Any ideas?

[Glenn Stanton]

i think the IO unit only supports 24-bit - https://g1.ikmultimedia.com/html/Manuals/AXEIO/AXE-IO-User-Manual.pdf

you know you can use 16-bit tracks in a 24-bit recording (the LSB is just padded until you use effects etc).

[azslow3]

Driver related setting are grayed when the driver doesn't allow to change them. So it is locked on AXE IO side.

But in general I can't imagine a reason to want 16 bit there. AXE IO dynamic range is significantly more then 96dB and DAW processing is done at 24bit (32 bit float, more when "Double precision engine" is enabled).

But you can record/render into 16bit files. Unlike with sampling frequency, I don't think Sonar put any restriction on different depth in one project.

[ZincT]

Thanks guys, I probably haven't changed it for so long it might even have been with my old interface when I last did it.

There is no way to change it on the AXE IO software panel so I guess it is fixed at 24 bit.

My only reason for wanting to change it is that I have been transferring some VHS videos for an old friend, and the sound capture is causing some issues.

The captured sound in OBS resembles what you get when you play back audio with mismatched sample rate/bit depth. So I have been trying to capture the sound separately using my AXE IO into Cakewalk. As far as I can tell, PAL VHS tapes used 48Khz 16 bit so I am trying to capture at that rate to avoid any such issues.

Anyway, I went ahead and captured the sound in Cakewalk (at 48khz 24 bit) while I waited for a response in this thread and it captured perfectly. So I guess I will just export it at 48Khz 16 bit and that will work okay in Davinci Resolve (I'm using it to add any final edits and improvements to the capture).

[Bass Guitar]

The sample rate will do that but the bit depth doesn’t matter. You can have any bit rate happening. 

Something might be going wrong with OBS because I now can’t stream using my Loopback from any Daw using ASIO. It always worked fine before. 

As said almost every Audio interface made runs at 24 and most cannot be changed. It’s burned into the converters I guess. 
Zoom and Steinberg I think are the only ones that I have seen that allows you to change and use 16, 24 and 32. 
 

 

[Promidi]

7 hours ago, ZincT said:

he captured sound in OBS resembles what you get when you play back

Are you using the OBS ASIO plugin with OBS?

[ZincT]

8 hours ago, Bass Guitar said:

The sample rate will do that but the bit depth doesn’t matter. You can have any bit rate happening. 

Something might be going wrong with OBS because I now can’t stream using my Loopback from any Daw using ASIO. It always worked fine before. 

As said almost every Audio interface made runs at 24 and most cannot be changed. It’s burned into the converters I guess. 
Zoom and Steinberg I think are the only ones that I have seen that allows you to change and use 16, 24 and 32. 
 

Of course, thanks, yes you are right about the bit depth not causing this effect. My old interface was a Steinberg UR242 so I guess that allowed me to change the bit depth.

TBH I think it is the video capture device I'm using which is problematic; a very old Dazzle DVC100 which I dusted off for this purpose. The video capture was fine in OBS and the sound is also fine for a lot of VHS tapes I have tried, but with my friends old wedding videos etc I get this regular clicking (like sample rate mismatch). There's also quite a bit of clipping on the audio which the DVC handles badly. Capturing the audio using my AXE IO, not only fixed the above but also allowed me to edit the audio in minute detail which resulted in much superior results. 

[ZincT]

7 hours ago, Promidi said:

Are you using the OBS ASIO plugin with OBS?

No, I was just using the Dazzle DVC100 USB driver, although for sound capture I'm now going to use Cakewalk with my AXE IO as that seems to work much better (see above response).