Re: [SoX-users] toward floating-point?

[Ulrich K. <ul...@ch...>]

Jan Stary <ha...@st...>:

> I still don't get it: on my system, sizeof(float) = 4.
> How can four-byte floats represent larger dynamic range
> than four-bytes integers (which, if I remember right,
> is currently SoX's internal sample format)?

For illustration, consider decimal numbers of four digits. Treated as  
unsigned integers, you may express values from 0 ("0000") or 1  
("0001") to 9999 ("9999") with them, so you have a dynamic range of  
9999:1 = 9999, or approximately 80 dB. Treated as floats however,  
"2718" were to be interpreted as 2.71*10^8 = 271000000, so you can  
express values from 1 ("1000") to 9990000000 ("9999"), and the dynamic  
range is about 200 dB. (It might even be a bit more, if you allow  
denormalized numbers like "0010" = 0.001.)

The trade-off involved is, of course, that you can't express the  
difference between 9990 and 9994 with our "decimal floats".

Ulrich