The original high standards of digital audio were 16 bit at either 44.1KHz or 48KHz sampling rate. These standards still exist today. Hundreds of thousands of these tracks exist and are still being recorded today.
Today, there are a number of D/A converter chips and A/D converter chips that brag about 24, or even 32 bits of output bit width (A/D converters) or input bit width (D/A converters). The promise of more bits is alluring, but is only a hand job at best. Higher numbers of bits have become new buzz numbers.
The heart of the lie is that all of the sd A/Ds or ds D/A chips have digital filters; all high res recordings not natively recorded, and many if not most of the high res recordings are all recorded with digital filters, which are required so the recording will not violate sampling theory. Kinda like physics. Like why it hurts when you crash cars, etc. Similarly, all oversampling D/A converters have some kind of digital filter. There are also “hidef” recordings natively recorded live or from analog at higher sampling rates – those are cool. The “hidef” recordings made from original redbook digital sources – they go through someone else's filter.
Now all of these filters multiply samples of the original by a series of coefficients; this is typically thousands of multiplications and as they go, the numbers get longer and longer. If the calculated coefficients start out at 24 bits, the numbers get longer from there. All of the above is irrefutable. So we get bonus bits that may be beneficial, according to how good the filter is. This is an important point - the bonus bits can be slop (always the case when the original bits are discarded) to boring, or occasionally even really good. Most of the filter derivations do not scratch my sonic itch.
So all filters do not sound the same. The megaburrito filter has a time domain and a frequency domain optimization. The time domain dating from Bell Telephone Labs (1917) and the frequency domain from a much later evolution of a similar filter from the same era. If you buy a Schiit multibit product, you get that filter. It optimizes more than anyone else’s, and keeps the original recording in its entirety. A lot of people really like it. I bet with the Yggy, Gumby, and Bimby that you may well like it a lot, particularly with redbook recordings which have not been sullied by other filters. In any kind of system.
Back to the bits - I know of no DAC that decodes any kind of reality beyond 20 bits and those get really expensive (Like the Yggy). You can use two per channel and get 21 real, honest to God bits. The megaburrito filter's DSP chip runs at 32 bits - not that is any bragging right other than it puts the computational errors at least 12 bits below the rounded output of Yggy, 14 bits below the rounded output of Gumby, or 16 bits below the rounded output of Bimby.
Numbers for numbers sake are fairy tales translated into marketing.
