First of all, it's not "excessively hot levels" that has destroyed music, it's the extreme limiting (or more specifically, the distortion caused by the limiting) of the dynamic range - the levels are exactly as "hot" as they've ever been, that is to say, no digital file can exceed 0 dBFS, so no file can be at a hotter level than another. As for extreme low levels, you CAN have a level down at - 200 dBFS in a floating point system - you'll have to raise it significantly before you could hear it, but you'll have the complete original dynamic range preserved when you do so. Seems maybe folks are mixing floating and fixed point examples here, hence the confusion?odarmonix wrote:I'm well aware of the purpose of floating point audio and that it basically offers virtually unlimited headroom. But I'm not sure this is truly relevant here, how many musicians use floating point audio when sending their tracks to mastering studios ? Us Reason users have floating point audio processing for certain things like the SSL, but we're still limited to a maximum of fixed 24 bit for import & export.ScuzzyEye wrote:Doesn't happen with floating point. You always have 24-bits of precision in the mantissa, the exponent changes as the scale of the values change. Floating point is very well suited for PCM encoding. The size of the steps between values get smaller as the values themselves get smaller.
A crude example would be values from 0.1 to 1 get 10 steps:
0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1.0
When you go up a level magnitude from 1 to 10, you still get 10 steps:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
And one more, from 10 to 100:
10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100.
Except you actually get 16 million steps at each scale level, and there are 256 scales.
That being said, does anyone REALLY need the insane dynamic range allowed by 32 bit float (let alone 64) for PCM encoding ? While the theory sounds good on paper it sounds like complete overkill to me, I'm not even sure it's all that useful for DAWs' internal processing and I don't remember having ever needed more than fixed 24 bit for any kind of task, although I can definitely hear the difference between 16 and 24 in some very specific situations.
Regardless of the above, in my previous post I only wanted to point out that working at extremely weak levels can be just as a bad idea as working with too hot levels, even though irreversible signal degradation is less likely with the former. Music definitely has been WAY more often butchered by excessively hot levels during the last two decades.
Next: the dynamic range of a floating point system (with regards to internal processing) has one huge advantage IMO, and that is the almost impossibility of clipping internally. Anyone that remembers working with Pro Tools (or any fixed point system) when it was 48 bit fixed will know what I'm talking about.
The advantage of 32 bit floating point's additional dynamic range is that there is not only the additional dynamic range BELOW 0 dBFS, but also ABOVE IT.
For me, it's not at all about being able to "hear a difference" with increased bit depths (I still export mastered mixes at 16 bits), it's about the way you can work with multitrack audio when you have additional dynamic range available. Looking to the past again, anyone who remembers 16 bit audio recording will appreciate 24 bits when it comes to recording audio. Talking recording live humans here, and being able to leave plenty of headroom when doing so - I haven't clipped an audio recording in YEARS because of this additional headroom.