ORIGINAL: attalus

ORIGINAL: mewsicknerd

IMHO, it doesn't really matter. The human ear can't hear distinctions in levels
so fine. Granted, performing many mixing and effect calculations can introduce
errors into the soup. But I doubt anyone could hear the difference.

We would need a massive ear and cognitive upgrades for our hardware to be able
to discern the difference.

I do believe soundcards will improve in near future and a know for a fact there has been serious talk in the music industry about raising the quality of cd from 16bit 44.1 khz to a higher bit and samplerate.Are you going to tell me you don't hear a difference between cd and dvd's? Even now if my memory serves me correctly, there are virtual media players that accept higher quality songs then what cd's accept.

You are misinterpreting what I said. I agree soundcards have much room for improvement. I said nothing about the 16 bit 44.1 standard of the CD, which was set by committee decades ago with the specific modest goal of providing better sound than most turntables and tapes, but not better than audiophile quality. Well, they succeeded

My comment was that given a 64 bit word size, we are unlikely to be able to hear any difference between a 64 bit fixed and 64 bit floating point implementation. My assumption would be that the choice between fixed and floating would be made based upon convenience related to the CPU instruction set/pipeline or IEEE standards.

Sinc has a great post on this thread. The discussion here is more software/electrical/mathematical engineering than musical/musician. But since everyone throws 64 bit all over their product literature these days, we should understand that so many are interested.