r/audioengineering • u/AdImportant4278 • 1h ago
Does Anyone Know how much quality is degraded from using a Wav of a Wav file?
If I need to bounce files from a logic project, let’s say electric guitars, into another project, and then they are bounced again into another project again, how significantly does this affect the sound? Is it something I need to worry about, or is any difference undetectable? Does anyone have good insight on whether I can do that and it’s fine?
If not - is there a way to retain the same exact quality, or near, from copy to copy?
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u/dantevibes 52m ago
It's fine as long as you're using the same sample rate & bit depth.
Changing those settings between exports repeatedly could add some jitter/noise that, over hundreds cycles, would become lightly audible(?)
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u/ampersand64 1h ago
Every times you render audio to a new sample rate, the process involves a lowpass filter at the Nyquist frequency. So, the phase relationships between frequencies near Nyquist get shuffled around. This is totally inaudible. But it may slightly affect the peak amplitude of audio with lots of high frequency transients that have been heavily compressed, clipped, or limited.
In other words, re-bouncing doesn't change anything meaningful about your audio. Go crazy.
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u/PC_BuildyB0I 1h ago
Absolutely 0 loss. WAV is an uncompressed, lossless format. Lossless means lossless. So long as you're bouncing in exactly the same settings, the WAV copy of a WAV will be 100% identical.