> Old standlone ADCs hit 16-bits pretty reliably. Nah. Lets look at it from a db perspective... I don't believe that the typical electrical engineer is in the

> Old standlone ADCs hit 16-bits pretty reliably. Nah. Lets look at it from a db perspective... I don't believe that the typical electrical engineer is in the business of circuits accurate to -96db levels of precision. Those circuits may have used a 16-bit ADC, but there's no way the typical circuit reached anywhere close to that level of precision. The bottom bits would be all noise in the vast majority of use cases. Even a 12-bit ADC takes a degree of effort to keep your errors and noise down. 16-bits means making no mistake in your entire circuit, across all temperatures, across all kinds of usages, such that your ADC line never drifts more than a few dozen microvolts off reality. That's just not typical circuit design. Temperature effects alone will screw you over and prevent you from reaching there.