• 4 kHs Gain plug-ins only null down to -124dB.
• 8 kHs Gain plug-ins only null down to -119dB.
• 16 kHs Gain plug-ins only null down to -113dB.
• 32 kHs Gain plug-ins only null down to -107dB.
• 64 kHs Gain plug-ins only null down to -101dB.
• 128 kHs Gain plug-ins only null down to -95.8dB.
• 256 kHs Gain plug-ins only null down to -89.8dB.
• 512 kHs Gain plug-ins only null down to -83.8dB.
• 1024 kHs Gain plug-ins only null down to -77.8dB.
Bro, your test is seriously flawed. Did you know that 16 bit export has a fixed noise floor of -96dB, and this noise floor cannot be raised by compressors or limiters, no matter how many you used in the project before exporting the audio? It's fixed. -3dB gain on one channel and +3dB on another channel is even a flawed way to do null test.
Also, you put 128 khs gain on a single channel. Come on bro, among all the major DAWs out there, how many of them allow more than 15 effects on a single channel? You are lucky to be using Reaper which is not limited in this area, but practically who would use 512 plugins on a single channel? The DAWs out there don't even allow that, even if you have one that allows that, your null test is done wrongly, the overall exported file in 16bit will have a 16-bit fixed noise floor, which is -96dB. If you export audio you synthesised in a DAW to 16-bit and re-import and duplicate and invert polarity, it will have 16bit fixed noise floor regardless of whether the synthesized audio had 10000 khs gain plugin inserted on its channel before original export. It's a fixed -96dB, never forget that. Overly increasing the gain on a channel leads to clipping distortion in the exported 16-bit file, but that is a different thing from bit depth and its noise floor.
I'm surprised you are even complaining about a plugin's 32 bit depth operation when the old gees from decades ago have given us classics, with their imperfect gadgets, that we are still listening to and enjoying today. See, that's the problem with engineers today; seeing everything through the eyes of engineering sometimes rob you of the enjoyment of your own craft. You have to losen up a bit and see and listen to your audio from a consumer's perspective. That's where the true enjoyment is. All the producers and engineers out there, if you were to ask them if there is still something they would like to fix in their already released song, they will definitely pinpoint a part they taught was not fully done. When it comes to audio, always pursuing 100 percent perfection through iron clad rules robs you of the enjoyment of your music and meeting your projects' deadlines.
Finally, we are in 2024, and guys like the developers of Reaper have made it so easy to deal with noise floor. It's not even compulsory to add dithering, all you have to do is to shape the noise floor to push it out of the audible frequency range. So in Reaper's render settings, you leave dithering off, and just turn the shape on, this way you are not adding dithering noise to replace the noise floor, you have rather shaped the file's original noise floor out of the audible frequency range. And then when you re-import that 16-bit file, duplicate, invert polarity, do a null test, and it's now way below -100dB. And anything below -100dB is inaudible to humans. [Period].
Kilohearts.
