For example, you'd need to run this test with music, not simple sounds. So the question is, which music? I think whatever is most popular at the time would be a

For example, you'd need to run this test with music, not simple sounds. So the question is, which music? I think whatever is most popular at the time would be a good candidate A quick summary would be that most "popular" music has been mastered with the following goal: the song should be recognizable and listenable on a FM-radio with only a limited bandwidth midrange-speaker. One of the many things they do to achieve this is by eliminated almost all dynamic range through a process called "compression" (dynamic compression, not digital-compression). They also limit the spectral range to not have "unheard" sounds cause distortion when played through limited bandwidth amplifiers and speakers. This means that the kinds of musical pieces which could benefit from the increased dynamic range of 24-bit would be thoroughly excluded from the test. And then you'd probably get the "expected" result, but only because you now test whether music mastered specifically not to have dynamic range benefits from having increased dynamic range. For which the answer is given. Note: I'm not claiming 24-bit end-user audio has merits, of which I have little opinion. I'm just pointing out the flaw in the proposed experiment. If you feed 24-bit input to headphones, there's no guarantee that the speakers are performing with 24-bit resolution. Not sure if you're just imprecise in your language here or if you're genuinely confusing things. Speaker-elements, as found in both speakers and headphones are analogue. They operate according to the law of physics, and respond to changes in magnetic fields, for which there is practically no lower limit. They have no digital resolution. A quick example: Take your 16-bit music, halve the volume and voila! You are now operating at "17-bit resolution". Halve it again. 18-bit resolution. Etc. There's probably some minimum levels of accuracy, yes, but it just doesn't make sense to measure it in bits. If you're aware of this and were just trying to adjust the language to the problem at hand, I'm sorry for being patronizing, but I just wanted to make sure we keep things factual here.