In music technology we often talk about n-bit systems. For example, the MIDI protocol is based on a 7-bit scheme, many sensor interfaces use 10-bit resolution for their sensor readings, and sound cards typically record in 16-bit, or even 32-bit. But even though we talk about these things every day, I am often surprised by how many people don’t really know what 7-bit actually means, and that a 32-bit system is not “double” as good as a 16-bit system.
I googled around a little, but couldn’t find a plain and easy table explaining the concept, so here it is, a table showing how many values/combinations you can have in systems with various types of bit-rate:
|16-bit||2^16||2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2…||= 65 536|
|24-bit||2^24||2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2…||= 16 777 216|
|32-bit||2^32||2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2…||= 4 294 967 296|