Question on increased dynamic range of MD over CD

[Guest NRen2k5]

Okay, just about every recorder these days has a 20-bit ADC and 20-bit DAC, right? And this gives us an increased dynamic range compared to 16-bit audio-CD...

So my question is, from the point of view of transferring tracks from PC to MD, is it the noise floor that's lowered or the ceiling that's raised?

This is particularly of interest to me because I know that most modern music is mastered very close to clipping on CD and when we encode to MP3 the quantization will push some peaks over 0db on the 16-bit scale. It's even worse if you're transferring MP3's to MD because you're taking something that may already be clipp and requantizing it, which will potentially raise some peaks even more...

Well, maybe I'm not making any sense...

[justin_barbier]

Actually, you're making perfect sense! This all seems logical. Anyone with knowledge on this? I'd like to know as well...