sander99
Headphoneus Supremus
Indead the more you post the clearer it gets you understand practically nothing of all this stuff (or are deliberately playing the fool).Digital clipping
This PCM waveform is clipped between the red lines
In digital signal processing, clipping occurs when the signal is restricted by the range of a chosen representation. For example, in a system using 16-bit signed integers, 32767 is the largest positive value that can be represented. If, during processing, the amplitude of the signal is doubled, sample values of, for instance, 32000 should become 64000, but instead cause an integer overflow and saturate to the maximum, 32767. Clipping is preferable to the alternative in digital systems—wrapping—which occurs if the digital processor is allowed to overflow, ignoring the most significant bits of the magnitude, and sometimes even the sign of the sample value, resulting in gross distortion of the signal.
Directly bouroughed for fair use EDUACATIONAL PURPOUSESSES: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipping_(audio)
TheRe yUh gO.
duh doi.
weapons drawn: wIkiPeDiA
A digital signal can clip (or wrap if you like) yes. But that has nothing to do with the bit depth.
Your drawing suggests that you think that for example 24 bit audio is converted to 16 bit by removing the 8 most significant bits. That is nonsense. One correct way would be to remove the 8 least significant bits. And maybe apply dither to the result. In general: of course you convert - or produce a new track - in such a way that the result fits in 16 bits without clipping, which is always possible. And as explained by G the only thing that changes is the noise floor, and because the noise floor of a 16 bit signal is not audible except when putting the volume ridiculously high it doesn't matter. (And even if you set it ridiculously high you probably still won't hear the noise floor because your hearing will adapt to the loud levels and become - temporarely if you are lucky - less sensitive).
But this thread is about 24 bit versus 16 bit uncompressed PCM. It doesn't say anything about massively compressed MP3. Indeed, if that is what you are talking about that is something else entirely. And that could sound bad yeah. So you are barking up the wrong tree here, it is not the fault of 16 bit uncompressed PCM/WAV.I have 800,000 songs of space on my 32GB phone SD card.
Like @chef8489 already said.