Hector Martin

That is only half of it. The first demo shows that a tone at < 96dB is still above the noise floor even with flat quantization noise. Shaped dither just improves things further. SNR is already > 96 on a band basis, which the article I linked later goes further into.

I haven't read it yet, but you have to integrate the floor noise throughout the entire band. Calculating SNR against the noise floor is wrong. Will read and come back

Ah, but we aren't talking about SNR, we're talking about dynamic range. Not quite the same thing ;). Music isn't a broadband noise source, so you get some extra perceptual headroom for free.

Let's sum it up, to see if we agree: 16 bit w/out oversampling allow for about 96 dB SNR. Using dithering you can have more than 96 dB SNR by taking advance of human hearing characteristics (an 'A' frequency weighting filter can be used for computations).

Other than that, you can use oversampling to gain more SNR, but that requires increasing Fs beyond nyquist.

You have to be careful though, the lower the Fs is, the more stringent requirements will be put both in the anti-aliasing and the reconstruction filters. Both must be analog and will not be the ideal brickwall filter.

Fs only needs to be strictly above 2*Nyquist for whatever you want to encode. Oversampling is a practical requirement for ADCs and DACs as an *implementation detail*. The end result is still a black box that takes analog in and spits 48kHz out.

The fact that the *practical* way to make a near-ideal ADC or DAC is by resampling/filtering digitally first is irrelevant. That does not change the fact that 44.1kHz/48kHz digital audio is and always will be sufficient to encode all the information.