Hooray !

Android L now supports floating point (32 bit) audio.
16-bit limited AudioTrack and everything else no more.

New: android.media.AudioFormat.ENCODING_PCM_FLOAT
Audio data format: single-precision floating-point per sample

And if you're not convinced why, see this sweet video from +Glenn Kasten

#supercurioBlog #audio #development

Source post on Google+

Published by

François Simond

Mobile engineer & analyst specialized in, display, camera color calibration, audio tuning

7 thoughts on “Hooray !”

  1. 24 bits is enough to capture a dynamic range wider than human hearing can detect.

    Problems with sound quality on phones/tablets are usually

    1. Poor quality mp3

    2. The source: over compressed and peak limited by mastering engineers (loudness war)

    3. DAC in the unit is noisy, tonally imbalanced, jittery, has poor stereo separation, lacks sufficient amplification / non-linear amplification causing distortion

    4. Poor quality headphones

    Solutions already exist for these problems. The introduction of floating point appears to be redundant

  2. Yes, you might have a good source (e.g. dark side of the moon), lossless format (e.g. flac), good DAC (e.g. Wolfson), and good headphones (e.g. Sony MDR… You'd probably want at least a portable headphone amp too if you're even remotely serious).

    In which case, why would you apply any signal processing?

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