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by brigade 5220 days ago
As he mentions, with 16-bit it's easy to significantly reduce the dynamic range or clip; you only get the full 120dB range of 16-bit with careful handling and calibration. You don't have to worry about all this with 24-bit - you'd almost have to deliberately screw up the signal to reduce the dynamic range below that of a human's.

Ideally audio engineers would take the effort to do good 16-bit conversion for distribution, but I realize that's too much to expect of them.