jaysung;237765 Wrote: > I always wondered why Philips and others didn't use 16bit floats for cd > format. When the CD format was established, 16 bit resoltution was past what the technology of the day could realistically provide to consumers. The existing EIAJ standard for digital audio defined a 14-bit format; indeed early Magnavox CD players used 14 bit DACs. I believe Philips was arguing for 14-bits, but Sony held out for 16-bit, and eventually Sony won. But the 14-bit infuence is very prevalent in the era. Even Sony's PCM-F1-type recorders were switchable between 14-bit EIAJ recording mode and a 16-bit mode, which replaced some of the error correction bits with data bits. The point is that back in the day, formats with higher dynamic range than 16 bits were not even on the radar. It was a struggle to get even 16-bits back then.
Remember also that the CD standard was developed in the pre-PC, pre-IEEE-floating-point era. Microcomputer chips existed (8080, Z80, 6502, etc) but none was sufficiently powerful for processing floating point at the speeds required. Also remember that the IEEE754 floating point standard had not been adopted then (it was one of several FP representations which were implemented in software), so hardware floating point processors had not been developed for the consumer market. Also, I don't recall ANY 16-bit float representation in general; most were 32-bit at the time. That said, at the time there were non-linear digital audio formats in use for telephony, mu-Law and A-Law. Maybe a better question is why did the CD standard pick 16-bit linear PCM instead of extending one of the telephony standards. -- Timothy Stockman ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Timothy Stockman's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=8867 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=39611 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
