On Sat, Jul 08, 2006 at 01:34:44PM +0100, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
  Is there a standard way of converting a 24bit sample
to 16bit?
 I ask because I think that in different scenarios, one would want a
 different result. 
As others have said - dither and drop the low 8 bits.  But...
  returned to the user. The problem here is what are the
"most useful
 16bits"? I have one application where just using the lower 16bits of the
 24bit value is ideal, due to extremely low input signals. 
Normalize the 24 bit sample first?