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

I am in the early planning stage of an audio processing application and I have come to the point of making the choice between floating point or fixed point (signed 2's complement) processing. What do you think is better, and why? Why does jack use floating point? Why does AES use fixed point in most of their standards? I understand the technical difference between the formats, but... I can't come to a conclussion. The adavantages of floating point I see are: - easier processing, specially amplification and mixing (multiplying by fractions) - more sse support, more packed array arithmetics - relationship to voltage and SPL easier to understand. (1.0f vs. 2^31-1 max. values) And its diadvantages compared to fixed point would be: - generally slower, specially things like addition - 30 bits of resolution for 32 bits of data in IEEE single-precision (exponents larger than 0 not used for audio, neither are denormalized numbers and redundant zeroes, infinities, etc), compared to the full 32 bits of resolution of fixed point. - non-linear saw-tooth-like precission (precission gets higher as mantissa gets larger and then falls abruptly at the point the exponent is increased) I am sure I fail to see the more important points and would be thankful for any comments. If it has been discussed on the list earlier, i am sorry to post it again. I couldn't find it. Greetigs, Dimitri -- NEU: Telefon-Flatrate f�rs dt. Festnetz! GMX Phone_Flat: 9,99 Euro/Mon.* F�r DSL-Nutzer. Ohne Providerwechsel! http://www.gmx.net/de/go/telefonie