And as expected from such a mathematical object, one needs to do all kind of clever calculations to compress a high rate audio source to a low rate bitstream. Of course, nowadays we receive a lot of support from the FPU making this all a piece of cake, with respect to calculation speed.
So, what's the big deal ? Let's see, as usual, it all begins with a standard. And a good one at that, the IEEE 754 standard. The problem with this standard is how it defines several bit format for floating point numbers, and how people decided, or not, to implement them.
