Good luck finding any analog gear period that can saturate 24 bits and not have noise in the LSBs, it just doesn't exist. That's not the point of 24-bit audio,

Good luck finding any analog gear period that can saturate 24 bits and not have noise in the LSBs, it just doesn't exist. That's not the point of 24-bit audio, it's not needing to worry about clipping. That's why knocking it down to 16-bit for playback is practically speaking fine.