[tialaramex]

I don't think I agree. As you say, those extra few bits in your integer PCM are probably just noise, worse they might be correlated noise. They're not worthless, but I can't agree that they're automatically better than the infinite headroom option.

We don't have a world with 24-bit float DAWS, in our world stuff tends to offer 32-bit float, and so that's a no brainer, but just as I'm sure the 14-bit CD would have been perceived much the same as our world's 16-bit CD (bad engineers would do a bad job with it, good engineers would learn to use it well, some people would hate it for no reason), I think 24-bit float in the studio would have similar fans to 32-bit float.