> there are people already discussing the merits of 64bit floating point over 32bit floating point
In my very humble opinion (haven't had the extremely fortunate fortune to be formally educated on DAC and in general the math involved there), I think that discussion is greatly valuable. When you are compounding information into information you can never become accurate enough. Error accumulates - that is the woe if digital composition.
I would love to accelerate all this stuff on a GPU - given workable knowledge on how to specifically turn all those crazy mathematical formulas into code; which given only a rip-off degree is practically impossible.
Even if you add 1 unit of interference at each processing stage (and since rounding tends not to be malicious, you may well do better than that), you'd need 128 poorly-implemented processing stages for a 32-bit float to be reduced to mere 16-bit integer precision - but in practice, likely more.
When it comes to clipping or loss of data on the lower end, well, 32-bit floats have an 8 bit exponent (254 reasonable values); that means that the loudest full-precision unclipped signal is 765 dB (!) louder than the softest un-quantized signal. Even with mediocre centering, that's more than enough.
I don't think 64-bit audio is likely to be noticable, even for processing purposes, outside of really specialist kind of niches.
Really, you don't understand how much of a marketing scheme my degree was. An absolute disgrace in terms of what education should be, I'm an idiot for falling for it.
I learnt convolution in my own time, so if you have resources (that don't include integration) I would absolutely love to read them. DSP is something that seems hard and I'd love to get into it.
In my very humble opinion (haven't had the extremely fortunate fortune to be formally educated on DAC and in general the math involved there), I think that discussion is greatly valuable. When you are compounding information into information you can never become accurate enough. Error accumulates - that is the woe if digital composition.
I would love to accelerate all this stuff on a GPU - given workable knowledge on how to specifically turn all those crazy mathematical formulas into code; which given only a rip-off degree is practically impossible.