you are normal.

human hearing is analog, tiny hairs on your eardrum move from sound pressure waves created by air, thats all analog.
bit depth is an expression of digital sampling either of analog instruments, like guitars and drums and vocals or rerpresentation of analog sounds in digital workstations, in any case its just a way of expressing an idea.

real musicians, the kind that make money and make people fall in love with their music, can create an emotional bond, a feeling, a sympathetic vibration within the listener. This happens irregardless of bit depth.

don't get lost in your tools, get lost in your compositions. Try to make them emotional, no one listening cares about bit depth, they care about emotional depth and feeling.

 

"Why can't I distinguish bit depth beyond 16-bit? I have excellent hearing..."
I bet you have, but only for a human.

You answered yourself: you are not biased (pretty rare thing) and admit that 24bits are not standing out to your ears.

However it's a good habit to store audio at better definition, you can scale it down, not the other way round.

Pretty long clips, but have a look to Ethan Winer's (a real audio myth buster), the previous @reticular posted and this:

 

Nailed it. Too rare...

 

I take offense at the part I quoted out, strictly speaking I'd say you don't lose any quality until your signal falls below the noise floor.
That is if we are strictly talking about the Analog/Digital conversion.

 

Well, it's true. As for me I'd see it more of a correction. I mean, offense is kinda big word

 

Nope - when you record at 16-bit, every 6dB lower your signal is it is losing an effective bit of resolution. (Alternatively, you can think of it as your noise-floor is getting higher). Either way, your signal is getting worse "quality" (however you choose to define that.)

This is why back in the day, recording to fixed-point 16-bit digital (DAT, samplers, whatever) meant you were always trying to get the hottest signal before clipping you could.

 

No, it gives you not more information. Regardless of 16bit, 24bit or 32bit float the information and the amount of information is exactly the same. The headroom differs vastly. Means the higher the bit depth the more freedom you have to place your audio within the available space. Nothing more. Nothing less.

To be absolute safe: record and work with 32bit float wavpack files and never ever again think of bit depth. Simply forget about it.

 

No one can hear a quality difference between 16bit and 24bit or more.
They only way to hear a difference is the dynamic range, since 24bit has more headroom.

 

read up a bit, above 16bits, the left and right ear process audio separately, effectively cancelling each other out, so you hear it, its just not audible to your brain and stuff according to the wikipedia AI that does all my thinking for me.. Gotta go try to cook a poptart with a steam iron for my latest TikTok challenge.