I'm a bit of an odd duck because I do ASIC design for work (custom Digital Audio Codecs) and do web development for fun/side work. So I do the bare metal and the high level.
I have an unrelated question for you: what's the state of the art in audio codecs?
Back in college ten years ago I was told that while technically we have 24bit ADCs, it's more of a marketing stunt because the few last bits are essentially garbage since the voltage levels correspoding to some of the more significant bits are somewhat off.
There are some DACs that claim crazy high SNRs of 130dB. But my experience is that anything over 100dB is really good. Anything over 110dB is nutty. That puts it at 21-22 bits.
You might be referring to "Effective Number Of Bits". Physically realizable ADC and DAC devices are not perfect so you can use metrics like ENOB to estimate how your system might actually perform.
Back in college ten years ago I was told that while technically we have 24bit ADCs, it's more of a marketing stunt because the few last bits are essentially garbage since the voltage levels correspoding to some of the more significant bits are somewhat off.