I'm asking this question for a friend who uses his computer to remaster audio. He has a Dell and a standard AC97 soundcard. For music, he uses Cool Edit to remaster CDs/MP3s to 20bit then burns them ...

I was told recently to use (at least) a 24 bit sample width during close-up recording of an acoustic instrument, in order to have sufficient headway (dynamic range) before any compression. I can see ...