On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 11:37:30AM +0300, Hannu Savolainen wrote: > Floating point in turn has 24 bits of precision which is enough for audio. > The exponent part takes care of scaling while the mantissa stays always > normalized to the full 24 bit precision. In fact 64 bit precision is used > for computations and intermediate results inside the FPU (x86 at least). > In this way the programmer doesn't need to think about the precision (in > most cases).
Pedantic geekiness warning Actually there are 25 fixed-point equivalent bits of precision, due to the implicit 1. Its not much difference, but sometimes it matters. - Steve