[linux-audio-dev] Fixed vs. floating point

[Steve Harris]

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