We’re talking about bad audio, though — setting full scale to 130dB doesn’t mean that the system can reproduce 130dB accurately or even hit 130dB at all. In an

We’re talking about bad audio, though — setting full scale to 130dB doesn’t mean that the system can reproduce 130dB accurately or even hit 130dB at all. In any case, while 130dB is a bit excessive, a highly efficient speaker (e.g. the old Voice Of The Theater) connected to a good modern amplifier and DAC could easily be cranked to 118dB with a noise floor that’s, at least in principle, inaudible in any normal room. (I’m not saying this is a good idea. But seriously, check out the performance of the top amplifiers at audiosciencereview.com — these things have ridiculous performance and aren’t even that expensive. About 120dB SNR at over 100W is something you can just buy, for about $1500.) (I’m also not claiming anything about linearity of the system or of people’s ears. But I can imagine 16 bits being put to better use in a well-considered floating point system than as plain linear PCM.)