Re: More bit-depth equals more headroom?
Another way to think about what has already been well stated is this:
16bit provides 96db of dynamic range. Your analog gear (and the analog section of your AD converter is likely 100db dynamic range (up to 120db for top shelf AD converters). So with 16 bit you want to print near peak to take advantage of the headroom.
24 bit provides 144db dynamic range (24db - 44db more than your analog gear. This means that you have up to 44db more dynamic range in digital than with your analog gear -so you could print with peaks at -20db in digital and the noise of your analog gear would still be greater than the noise floor of digital.
To make things easy, setting your converters to -18dbfs is a safe bet (and is the default for many interfaces like the Lynx Aurora). It means 0vu in analog comes into digital at -18, so even if you have peaks at +10db in analog you still have 8db of digital headroom.
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